Episode 592: Hogan

Like a midnight and the rock and roller He's in a fight for wrestling solar Using a racket and some mind controller He's Jim Cornette

The keys to the future held by the past And with tag team partner Barion last He sends this message out by podcast He's Jim Cornet

He never backs down from a fight.

He never wins the pony because his mama raised him right.

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Hello, good, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Jim Cornette Experience.

We're not going to do the show that we were going to do today,

but we're going to do the show that we need to do, a variety of things.

We're going to talk about everybody from Jack Pfeffer

to Hulk Hogan.

And joining me in all of this, Hawaiian Brian, the podcasting lion, the king of the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network, Mr.

Co-host to you.

If Jack Pfeffer did a podcast, he'd be the co-host.

Be great.

Brian, last, everybody.

Aloha, Jim.

A pleasure to be here once again.

Brother, for a big episode.

Everyone's been waiting to hear about your travels.

And of course, there's wrestling that aired.

But yesterday, as we are recording, big news happened.

So I knew today would be a very interesting show.

Well, and, you know, we can't do anything else but lead with this because of the

magnitude of the situation, which, you know, had been rumored for some time and had been shot down.

But yesterday, as we sit here and talk, Hulk Hogan passed away.

They said cardiac arrest.

He was at his home.

He was 71 years old.

And

I know a lot of people were instantly tweeting at us.

Dave, why aren't you talking about this?

It's been not even 24 hours, I don't believe, since the news came out.

And when I heard about it a few hours later, I had a face full of Novocaine from sitting in a dentist chair.

So we have tried to regroup and think about this as best we can.

So we don't need to be the news breakers.

We are commentators and we'll try to analyze things a little bit for the good and the bad.

But,

you know, it surprised me

the level of vehemence for the people

who

had the negative opinion of Hulk Hulk Hogan, I figured it would be like,

you know, well, when

the big star dies or celebrity, a sports figure, even if he was controversial, everybody, you know, kind of goes with it.

But this, is it just social media, Brian, or for the people who loved him or were fans, they were broken up.

And for the people who didn't, they weren't.

Is it just Twitter?

I haven't talked to anybody personally about about it, but what the fuck?

I don't think it's just Twitter.

I think Twitter certainly magnifies everything a whole lot more, but it's a complicated legacy.

There's the legacy in the life of Hulk Hogan, the character.

And then there's Terry Boleia, the person who played the character of Hulk Hogan.

And,

you know, it's certainly a legacy that's taken a lot of hits, a lot of them self-induced.

over the last score, over the last 20 years.

But

a lot of the reaction I saw, and I know a lot of what I was feeling, because

we've had a lot of fun on this show talking about, laughing about the various stories that he would concoct or the things that he would say in these interviews.

And of course, there's the infamous tape of him having sex with Bubba the Love Sponge's wife, and then the declarations that he made about himself being a racist afterwards.

You know, there's all these things, and there's also at the same time

this guy that for a lot of people was the entry to pro wrestling.

You know, I became a big fan in 89

and I already knew who a lot of the guys were because of Hulk Hogan's rock and wrestling when I was six, because of the figures that got to the stores when I was five.

I had a Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant action figure before I ever saw them, before I really knew too much about them.

And I think for a lot of people, especially my generation, my age group,

Hulk Hogan was not only the biggest star of a generation and the face of WWF, but he may be the actual reason you first became aware of wrestlers or wrestling.

And I think for a lot of people, the people who Still get chills thinking about the Andre the Giant body slam at WrestleMania 3 in 87, the people who still remember the big Saturday night's main events and all the big moments, even the WrestleMania match with The Rock, what a special series of moments that was.

It's a tough thing to weigh all of those positive memories and experiences with

the conduct, the words.

You know, again, and it wasn't just the bucket.

The meltdown.

Yeah, I mean, remember, you know, when his son Nick got into that accident and forgive me for not knowing all the details, the person riding with him was

a vegetable pretty much from that point forward.

There was a big issue.

Then there was a tape of like Hulk Hogan going to the prison and, you know, basically, you know, making themselves the victims, not the victim.

Well, so, I mean, there's a lot of things like that, but, but again, you know, it's, it's hard.

You know, there aren't a lot of examples.

He wasn't a murderer like OJ.

So you can't really say like, you know, look at when OJ died, but it's hard.

I think a lot of the mainstream stuff I've seen is kind of focused on,

I don't want to necessarily say the positives, but the realities of his, the magnitude of his star.

But everyone does address

the scandals.

I mean, he brought down Gawker with that lawsuit that Peter Thiel funded.

So it's not like he wasn't always in the middle of stuff, but it's a complicated legacy to kind of weigh.

He learned very well in the wrestling business, the old fashioned wrestling business of how to

promote himself, make himself bigger, make himself more important in the days when you couldn't just readily

poo-poo a bullshit story and didn't realize he had done so much mainstream publicity where

the host or the interviewer or the people involved had almost no knowledge of the inside of the business or even the business in general that he could just say shit.

And he got used to that.

And then it got

it came back to bite him as far as the the stories that we've made fun of and etc

and the books that he wrote that is easily you know disprovable but to the to the kid that was a fan in those days and then didn't know anything about wrestling for 20 years he buys hulk hogan's book and he buys the whole thing

but there's also a third segment you talked about

the people who,

you know, who loved him and were introduced to wrestling, the fans and or the, you know, people on the other side, as controversial as he was, and as many people as he had been involved in at least somewhat double crossing or, you know, creative controlling or maneuvering or whatever,

you saw from a lot of people in the business.

He did, they loved him.

There were people that loved him in the business, as well as people who were like, you know,

Jesse Ventura.

Yeah, I'll give you a great example because I thought about this.

Scott Dickinson, one of the real nice guys out there, former WCW referee, refereed a lot of places, but most famously WCW.

Years ago, I forget what you and I were talking about, but we were probably laughing about one of Hogan's things.

And he got in touch and he told me a story, and I was shocked to hear it.

I don't know if he's shocked the right word, but I was really pleasantly surprised.

I don't know what.

He said that when Brian Hildebrand, referee Mark Curtis in WCW got sick, when they found out, I guess maybe the first time or whenever it was, when they found out that the cancer was really bad.

Yeah.

Somehow word got to Hogan.

And he said that they were surprised when all of a sudden Hogan approached Brian Hildebrand and said, Is there anything I could do?

Let me, and I think he even did try to get him in with some doctors or something.

That's a story that we didn't hear from Hulk Hogan.

So it's not like it's a tale that he just made up.

It's something I'm hearing from a friend of Brian Hildebrand's.

Well, you know, that's the thing that I always said about the stories that he was telling

is that his real ones were good enough.

He was the big mega sensation in the wrestling business.

And

there's so many, you know, ways you could have

told those stories and not been completely full of shit, you know, and Metallica couldn't have didn't need to be involved or whatever, because the real stuff he had something to work with.

But

that's what, you know, very complicated.

And

I know I've even had people on Twitter the last day say, oh, I can't wait to hear Cornette and Last roast Hogan now that he's gone.

I'm like, have we ever been

personally mad at each other?

You and I and him?

We laughed at the bullshit, but he was a big deal in a wrestling business.

Now,

I wasn't a fan of him being a big deal in a wrestling business while he was a big deal in a wrestling business because I was on the side.

And

it's no secret I was not a fan of the

Vince Jr.'s WWF ideas for the 80s with the

kitty program and et cetera, because we were in the NWA and that was wrestling.

And,

you know, so it was not my cup of tea.

I was on the southern side while they were on the northern side.

But the thing, actually, I don't think people realize, and we've said this, I've said it before,

that I have that, I would say that I have probably

been in, I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this properly.

I've been in the same room with Hulk Hogan

in my life like eight fucking times, maybe.

So I had no positive or negative personal interaction with him ever.

I think five or six of those were when I was the photographer in Memphis and he was here in 1979.

I took the pictures.

Then we were, then

once was at the NAPTE Convention, the National Association of Television Program Executives in New Orleans, I believe, in 1991.

We passed greetings as he was at a booth and I was at a booth.

And

that may be the last time ever.

So the point is, I'm not

going to crow about it.

I finally got what was coming to him

because I

barely ever met the fucking guy.

But we were, you were a fan as a kid.

I was not a fan as a kid because I'm older.

I was a kid before.

he was in a business and a fan.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

But

we have always acknowledged the magnitude of the money that he drew.

And the fact that,

remember, I said, when we were talking about Flair, I said, we were talking about the number one box office attraction of the year every year in the 90s or in the 80s.

I said, well, it wouldn't have been Flair if it hadn't been for Hulk.

It would have been Flair if it hadn't been for Hulk.

You know, like seven years in a row or whatever.

And

I don't know

between

there's differences between being the biggest box office attraction and the biggest mainstream star.

And sometimes you might be able to be both at the same time.

But as in terms of biggest box office attraction of wrestling, besides

Nobody's ever going to top Jim Londos because that was a

completely different generation and everything was different.

But since then,

who would have been

for a short period of time, Austin and Rock drew more money,

but a much shorter period of time.

Locally, Bruno was obviously the biggest thing ever, but we're talking about someone who on a national stage,

you know, with some ebb and flow at a certain point in the early 90s, but for 20 years was the biggest drawing card and the most recognizable pro wrestler in the world.

Well, and even Gorgeous George,

while he at one point, the name Gorgeous George, then the

image of the blonde guy, Gorgeous George, because of the early network TV,

more people may have known who he was at a period of time in this country, but he didn't draw the money and it didn't last nearly as long.

And I mean,

don't let anybody say Cordette said Gorgeous George didn't draw money, but he flopped flopped in New York.

But I'm talking about

Gorgeous George Moore became a celebrity because Bob Hope and everybody on television was also talking about him.

And it was in Hollywood where they all saw him, and it was all over TV in Los Angeles, as we've talked about.

And it was the early days of TV.

There were only a few channels, and wrestling was one of the most watched things on American TV at that time.

So, as far as at the gate, and take Londos and Londos was a bigger mainstream star because people had to read the fucking newspaper every day.

There was no television or whatever.

But take him out of it and,

you know, it's got to be Hogan.

And Bill Longson was a big draw in the 40s when everybody else was in the army.

So

that's why I think it, for a lot of people,

it's been kind of sad.

The ones that really really liked him and were fans, or

probably

even

the guys that liked him, his friends in the business probably at some point were rolling their eyes at all the things he was getting into.

That were,

you know, it's ended up like it has where there's memes of

Hogan walking through the pearly gates and there's God and he's black.

And it's like, what?

Jesus, that's harsh for a guy who never actually fucking went to jail for fucking anybody up or anything.

It's the fact that he said on the tape that, you know, we're all racist or I'm a racist to a point.

Whatever he said, it was a declaration that he never walked back completely.

I mean, when he made the big apology to the WWE locker room and again, a lot of wrestlers.

Well,

it wasn't an apology.

It was a warning.

Don't don't get caught saying stupid shit.

Be careful on social media was like his message.

Don't let them know what you really think.

So, I mean, that's where, you know, people really lose it for Hogan.

There are a lot of fans out there who really, really grew to dislike him because they grew up feeling the opposite way.

And then all of a sudden, there's a secret video of him throwing the N-word around, saying things about his daughter dating an African-American.

and then declaring himself a racist while cheating on his wife or whatever it was with the guy's wife who was filming.

I mean, the whole thing.

Well, come on now.

Be fair, with what we've learned about his wife afterwards, wouldn't you have been trying to fucking find another goddamn country to live in or something?

Well, the point is, it was all out there.

And Hogan,

I don't know how big things would have been.

Let me rephrase that in English, ladies and gentlemen.

I don't know if an apology, a genuine, heartfelt one,

would have changed everyone's opinion, but it would have gone a long way, especially amongst people in the wrestling business.

You You know, because that's the other thing you started seeing was a lot of like, let's say, the contemporary WWE wrestlers, AEW, remember, AEW banned Linda Hogan.

And it wasn't like the people there weren't thinking, Hogan, Hulk Hogan, too.

You know, they got to a point where the modern generation of wrestlers was offended by him, was offended by him being around.

Well, that's why I mentioned I would have to think that a lot of the guys from his generation that were friends and liked him were rolling their eyes and like, please, hookster, give us something to work with, you know, every once in a while and don't get in

some of these deals.

But you, you know, you mentioned the 80s before and Ric Flair.

To me, it's like that's

those are the leaders of that generation, and we just lost one.

And again, they've all had a fall from grace in one form or another.

But when you look at Hogan, Flair, and Vince, like to me, those are the three monumental figures.

Jesus Christ, if I now that you just said that, I'm sorry, but now that you have just said that,

and we see 40 years ago, if you had said, well, here's what's going to happen to these three,

we'd have fucking put you in a rubber room.

And it's happened.

Yeah.

Now, you brought up before, you know, you've only been in a room with Hogan a few times.

I'm guessing the first time you were was maybe the most impactful.

Did you take his very first promo photos?

I wouldn't, I know, I can't claim.

I took the very first ones and probably the only ones that were taken in the Memphis territory.

But now

here's the thing.

They broke him in in Florida, as everybody knows.

We're not going to, I'm sure you can find another podcast to give you chapter and verse, but we're trying to make this somewhat first-person accounts.

They broke him in in Florida and in 78, and he worked under a mass down there.

So I don't technically know if he'd had any pictures taken of him barefaced because he was the super destroyer or whatever, right?

Yeah.

So then

they booked him

in Alabama.

Louis Tillet was the booker at that point in time.

And was it continental?

Not yet.

It wasn't even continental yet.

It was still southeastern.

It was southeastern and it was just when they had opened up the Alabama end because it was in Knoxville and then Ron Fuller opened up the second part of the territory.

And so it used to be the old Gulf Coast territory and the fields and et cetera.

But nevertheless, because it was next door to Florida, so they booked him over there.

And about six weeks later is when

Jared booked him up here.

Well, and see, here's the thing.

At that point in time, in April, May of 1979, Robert Fuller was still booking Memphis for Jarrett.

And he used a lot of the Knoxville crew because it was the other end of the state.

But since Knoxville Knoxville was affiliated with Continental, they heard about this big blonde guy they had down there in Pensacola and said, Well, let's bring him up because Lawler was doing a deal.

Mongolian Stomper was the southern heavyweight champion.

Lawler was working with him.

Gorgeous George Jr.

was the stomper's manager.

And so Lawler brings in a mystery wrestler

into the Mid South Coliseum to face the Mongolian stomper for the title.

And it turns out to be

Terry Boulder, Terry the Hulk Boulder.

And then the next week was a tag team match with Lawler and Hulk against Stomper and Gorgeous George Jr.

And they brought him to Louisville, I believe, at the same time for a week or two.

And then he went back down to Continental.

But I had gotten

a couple pictures of him then as the Lawler tag team.

And then he came back about six weeks later.

That's when they brought him in with,

well, at that time, he was Eddie Boulder because they were supposed to be the Boulder brothers.

But it was Dizzy Hogan, Ed Leslie, et cetera, et cetera, Brutus Beefcake.

And then they were here for a couple months, and I got some more photos there.

So most of the

pictures that I've seen actually pose stuff rather than in the ring

in Knoxville, Southeastern or Continental or Southeastern down in Alabama is my stud, the blue background, especially.

I think there's a red background, but that's those are, yes, stuff that I did.

What do you remember about him at that point?

Obviously, you're just a photographer.

Absolutely nothing.

I'm the photographer.

He's a big fucking new guy that is photogenic as fuck.

So I said, hey, let's get some pictures.

And he does the poses.

And this is literally.

on the way to the ring because that's the way

I set my shit up so I could catch the guys.

They're upstairs getting warmed up.

Hey, let's get some pictures.

Ding, ding, ding.

Off they go.

So

I didn't have anything to pass the day with him about, right?

And he's brand new, doesn't know anybody.

So he's got the photographers taking some pictures of him.

And boom, and that was that.

So you had seen already superstar Billy Graham.

And you had seen Austin Idol.

Now, two guys who directly influenced Hulk Hogan.

Billy Graham influenced everyone but he stole so much from austin idol he's admitted it too from when they worked together in atlanta yeah he stole so much from austin idol but you had seen them already and the fans in memphis had well now hold on

i hadn't seen graham yet graham came in at the end of 79 but obviously

you know we were cognizant of graham but go ahead but you had seen rocky john you had seen guys with good physiques there before how did the fans take to hogan just in terms of of the look?

Because beyond the eventual promo ability, which wasn't there at all yet, beyond the eventual charisma, which may have been barely there yet, it was the look.

It was, forget about the shaved belly hair and everything going on.

The mushroom cloud.

Forget about that even.

Just the muscles, the look, the beginning of the steroid era.

for wrestling where it went from occasionally some guys did it to just about everyone's going to be doing it how did he stand out in 79 amongst those fans well and and also you remember the uh the video that they did

where michael st john like michael saint john uh from nashville did the voiceover

of the camera

shoots the wrestling boots and then there's the i can't do the voiceover from memory from 50 years ago but He stands six foot seven.

He weighs 325 pounds, whatever.

And the camera pans up and it he's he's in bodybuilding pose lighting right where it's black behind him and the spotlights on him and the camera goes all the way up and he hits the fucking hulk poses and everything the hulk is coming

and that was enough to get people's attention and when they brought him in as lawler's partner okay look at the look at the fuck that was the you know

reaction from the people and they put those matches in the main event and they got over with the people that were there.

But as you will recall, that was a period of time where, as I mentioned, Robert Fuller was booking and

I got to be

Memphis.

I didn't know at the time how far down Memphis was, but I knew Louisville was feeling puny.

And so it wasn't like that he made a tremendous difference the first couple of weeks he was there when he was Lawler's partner, but the match he got over and the matches got over.

They worked around shortcomings.

And,

you know, he got the fucking, the bear hug, the super southern squeeze on the Mongolian stomper.

And he's selling it.

People are going crazy.

Right.

And then when they come back,

here was the problem.

The problem is they came back

when Robert Fuller had taken all the Knoxville guys.

And we've talked about this.

Pete Austin.

Well, yeah.

Well, hold on now.

It wasn't the whole problem.

There were other problems.

But Fuller had taken all the guys back to Knoxville when the guys left to go with the Paphos and run opposition, Garvin, Rupe, Orton, et cetera.

The whole thing had shifted.

Now Jarrett's got to rebuild the territory.

So he

shoots the Tupelo concession stand brawl angle, and he puts Wayne Ferris and Larry Latham as the blonde bombers on top.

Later, the honky-tonk man and Moondog Spot.

My old partner, Danny Davis, was their manager, Sergeant Danny Davis.

And that was the program with Lawler and Dundee.

He had Tommy and Eddie Gilbert against Buddy and Ken Wayne.

And

Ron Bass came in, outlaw Ron Bass, who's a very talented guy, but never been a big draw in the Tennessee territory since the days of Ron and Don Bass with their manager, Maul Bass, in the early 70s.

And that's who

Hulk was the Terry the Hulk boulder, was going to work with, and with his brother, Eddie,

who was worse than he was,

who could not work and could not talk.

Hogan was starting to worry he could, he was trying to do the, let me tell you something, Jack, thing.

You know,

he was trying that at that point, but he wasn't confident with it, but he could carry it off.

But between the hair that

beefcake had, which was just preposterous, remember that long bleached blonde?

It just, oh, God, he got heat

from the guys in the audience.

And

they couldn't work.

And then they had to, and then you mentioned Pete Austin, who's this kid.

I don't know where the fuck he went from there.

Maybe home.

But he was like...

6'3 and 260 or 70 pounds.

And they paired him up with Ron Bass against these guys.

And so Hulk won the Southern title from Ron Bass at one point, I think.

But I remember that the problem was they were trying to,

Jarrett was trying to make the people take them as main eventers by booking them in the main event.

And back in those days, the main event went on last.

And the classic example of how that it didn't work

was the night that the WFIA convention, the fans convention was in town in July of 79, right?

That's the night they got to see the future of wrestling in two different ways.

Maybe they didn't realize it, the theme music for the Free Birds and then Hulk Hogan.

Yes.

But what stole the show was the past of wrestling

because

the Free Birds worked with Lawler and Dundee and they did what they did and people were happy with it, right?

And the entrance was cool, you know, no doubt me and brad hildebrand kneeled down at ringside together watching that and the last match was terry and eddie boulder the hulk they usually wrote the hulk and eddie boulder because that was cooler but against ron bass and pete austin with danny davis no i'm sorry he wasn't their manager yet but ron bass and pete austin in a tag team match.

And the match in the middle was Wayne Ferris, Larry Latham, and Danny Davis in a three-on-two handicap match against Jackie and Roughhouse Fargo.

Jackie Fargo hadn't been in Memphis in two years.

It'd been four for Roughhouse.

And they tore the fucking house down, literally.

The tables were turned over.

Fargo was kicking the legs off that oak table to fucking bash him over the heads with.

The fucking roughhouse went crazy.

And after that, here comes Terry and Eddie Boulder.

He has Ron Bassett, Pete Austin.

The people come.

There was trickling in the aisles of like, let's beat the traffic.

And I mean, it had drawn, there was 7,000 people there that night, which was up from what Fuller had been doing

a month, six weeks beforehand.

But

they all came to see the Fargo's.

It's the same thing that happened when Zulu was on top with, was it the Stomp?

Yes.

Yes.

You said four years earlier.

Was it four years earlier when that happened?

yes that was 1975 they sold out three weeks in a row but he wanted to put the jared's philosophy was put the southern heavyweight title match on last so stomper and zulu had three straight sellouts with the fargo's underneath

all three fargoes that time jackie don and roughout jackie don and rough outs is what i'm trying to say nuthouse yeah

sometimes known as nuthouse so i mean that's memphis and he goes from there to georgia becomes steep and golden no one's surprised to hear that he was a favorite of Jim Barnett's.

And now, wait a minute, remember at that time, and oh, and let's, but let's back up a second because when he was working

in

the Alabama end of Southeastern, when he was first coming up for Jarrett, that's when they did the angle with him and Andre the first time.

The arm wrestling, where they turned the table over and blah, blah, blah.

And

because they had dates on andre in southeastern so

not only by the time that

hogan went to work in atlanta for barnett in late 79 early 80 that's when barnett was annexing knoxville ron fuller is well fuck these guys have up my whole territory And so they started using the Georgia talent.

So

Hogan and Andre had some matches, not only in Alabama when he first got started, a handful, couple, whatever, but they sold out Dothan one night, which was unheard of.

But also he worked, they worked with each other in Knoxville before they'd even worked with each other in Atlanta or then later on in the Super Dome.

Yeah.

you know the big shows around the country shea stadium yeah that's what's crazy if you look at the show you just talked about in memphis the summer of 79 one year later, Hogan and Andre do the Superdome for JYD versus Michael Hayes as an attraction brought in by Watts.

And then the Shea Stadium show,

which, I mean, it's really incredible, you know, one year after that Memphis show, how many big crowds, not just Hogan, but the Hogan-Andre package was in front of.

Well, and see, think about this.

You know,

by 1981,

he's already had, you know, a run in New York or is in the middle of his run in New York.

And a matter of fact, I, again,

saw him in 1981.

I was in Memphis when he came in the one shot to work with Lawler, when Jimmy Hart was bringing in all of Lawler's old nemesises and nemesi

to face him.

And he came and did that one shot.

They would always show that footage.

And because Lawler didn't pin him, they would never show the finish.

Yes.

It would, and a DQ was flat at that point, but then Lawler got a hold of Jimmy Hart and people went crazy and blah, blah, blah.

But nevertheless, in those two years,

he had gotten confidence because

he was a smart guy, especially when it came to what was getting him over, what was best for him.

He picked that up quick because he worked with all those top guys in that first two years, was exposed to all.

He was a...

He was partners with Jerry Lawler.

They have to learn something, even for, you know, three weeks.

He worked with Harley, I think, in 79, didn't he?

Well, but

then he's in the ring with Andre,

and he's working for Jerry Jarrett, who he

always kind of acknowledged that was a big help to him.

But he's working in Atlanta around Jim Barnett, even if they did name him Sterling Golden.

And then

Vince Sr.

and in the ring with, you know, the talent up there.

So he was able to pick up.

He was never going to be flair as far as a in-ring performer, but for a guy that size that looked like that,

he was able to pick things up quickly on how to either be a heel or later on how to be a babyface.

And I mean, Hulkin up, if he'd have been wearing a strap, he'd have been a lawler dropping a strap.

Yeah, see, there's always been debate about where Hogan picked up certain things.

Like, it's obvious that Hulkamania was because of his exposure to idle mania when Austin Idol was doing that in Georgia.

The superstar Billy Graham-style promos, calling everyone brother, this and that.

You can kind of see that.

The Hulking Up, you've heard people say was Lawler.

You've heard some people say it was the Crusher.

Well,

it could be, it could have been any babyface because, see, that's the thing.

It's not like Lawler invented that concept either.

All babyfaces,

pretty much in the last 50, 70 years, TV era, whatever of wrestling, they had some

movement or action reaction that would indicate to the fans they've had all they can stands and they can't stands no more, and something might be about to happen.

That's a very wide description.

But

again, you know, this is where, and it's some dusty too, when he was a babyface in Florida.

Yeah, I was going to say Dusty.

When he'd start wagging that finger, right?

And Hogan's watching that and he's partners with a guy that fucking gets pickled and fucking straightens up and turns away.

But of course, he didn't do anything like Lawler did, in my opinion, but the same principle.

But all of that, that was osmosis in those two years.

And then he goes to Japan.

And he's in a different situation there, but he commands huge money because

look at the fuck that.

Over there, He's a giant American.

Well, you know, part of the story started happening in Japan.

I mean, the biggest example is certainly Minneapolis, the AWA.

The fans turned him.

The fans started accepting him.

And again, he stood out in that era when you first started really seeing the physiques.

Kerry von Erich wasn't as physically imposing in 81 as he would be in 84.

Like, it was just the beginning of that era.

And Hogan went everywhere the first time as a heel.

And the fans started really liking him.

And he kind of, you know, again, it's an era-changing.

You know, obviously the movie, and we'll get to that in a little bit, was a big deal, but Vince brings him in, Vince Sr.,

gives him the name Hogan.

Eventually, the Hulk thing would cause a problem with Marvel Comics because they own the rights to the Hulk.

And they would, remember, back then he was the incredible Hulk Hogan once he started getting yes.

Yes, later he became immortal, but he was incredible.

Well, literally, they weren't legally allowed to call him the incredible Hulk Hogan.

And Marvel Comics got a percentage of all sorts of things throughout the Hulkamania era.

It's pretty incredible, but he goes up there.

Do you remember who was the president of the Hulk Hogan fan club?

Oh, my God.

It wasn't it

Mike.

Yes.

Help me.

Mike O'Hara.

Mike O'Hara.

Mike O'Hara was.

Sorry, Mike.

He told me that he was on 605 once and he had a problem a few years later because he was doing this fan club.

And he says he was one of the people that right after after the 79 WFIA convention brought photos of Hulk Hogan to the office.

You know, a lot of people have said that they had, you know, submitted photos of Hogan and recommended him.

He says he did it and

he was interviewing Hogan's parents.

You know, it was a real fan club.

WWE sent him legal notices to shut it down and he just kept responding.

Ask Hulk Hogan.

Ask Hogan.

He knows who I am and what I'm doing.

Yeah.

Well, as a matter of fact, Mike O'Hara,

he's in the picture of all of us from that convention when we were wearing our wrestling t-shirts that's been Twitterfied here lately.

But yes, he was at the Memphis show that night and the TV that

weekend when he took some of the pictures, same as I did.

Mine were still earlier because I caught him on the first run, but that was

summer of 79, as Brian Adams would say.

And they bring him in and they give him Fred Blassey as a manager.

And, you know, a couple of different looks.

He had the leotard for a while.

He had the chest hair for a while.

He wore blue.

I mean, they were really

wore blue.

No, I mean, it was trying to figure out who was what.

Blue velvet.

The rumor always was, I don't know how true it was, that Vince McMahon Sr.

wanted him to dye his hair red.

I think that's no, no, no, no.

You've heard that, right?

You heard Hogan say that?

Yeah, yes.

And no, no, no.

No,

and it's not even,

they've, I think, I don't know where the idea was that Vince Sr.

specifically

wanted him to be an Irish

heel or Irish person or whatever

has come from.

If that was Hulk, also, if somebody's corroborated it, then I'll back off on this.

But he had already been using Hulk,

but

I guarantee you.

Vince Sr., as well as Vince Jr., wouldn't have liked Hulk Boulder, Terry the Hulk, Boulder, Sterling Golden Day.

They like alliteration.

Hulk, Hulk, Hulk Hogan, because Hogan's a good fucking name.

But he wasn't going to be carrying a shillale with red hair or whatever the fuck.

And also look at the way, again, that he was dressing.

He was trying different colors and he had the old heel cape that he had.

It wasn't like a long Batman cape.

It was like a short fucking Audrey Hepburn cape or whatever.

None of that screamed Irish, did it?

It was just, it was an alliterative name that looked good on the marquee.

And here's the Hulk Hogan.

And you can hear him as a heel.

I can see

Vince Sr.

acting it out or Vince Jr.

acting it out if

he was envisioning the name as a heel name.

And his name's Hulk Hogan.

And he's huge.

So

I think that was probably the depth of that.

They did not know they were naming the future all-time biggest fucking draw they ever had right then.

See?

I'm sorry.

I don't mean to get upset,

but it's just when everybody tries to

all this deep meaning into these things.

Well, Hogan's up there.

He's as Freddie Blassey.

They do the program with him and Andre.

Hogan never gets any matches with Backlund, the champion, at the garden, gets some matches in other locations, which were big deals, but it wasn't the garden.

It is something there in terms of the way they're protecting him.

Eventually, he leaves, does jobs on the way out, and then he goes to film Rocky III.

And that's really not just for Hulk Hogan, but in a lot of ways for the wrestling industry.

That's one of the biggest things that ever happened.

Well, yeah, because,

and obviously, I saw Rocky III in theaters when it first came out, not just because there was a wrestler in it, but because you went to see all the goddamn Rocky movies at that point in time uh

but

that opened up the door to every talk show because he was just so visually impressive

and

it came off like it was the you know one of the highlight scenes of the movie and what everybody was talking about and then he looks so good not only when he

It does the talk shows or the publicity, but by now,

this is what, you know, four years around all these

people

kind of contributing to telling him how to fucking get over.

And he's smart, as I said, and he's learned it.

Now he can go and bullshit the main.

Oh, yes.

And

that was publicity that most wrestlers didn't get in those days because

even if they were drawing the same kind of crowds, they didn't look like that.

And they didn't have that.

visibility from being in a movie that would lead to those doors.

And then, to be honest with you, a lot of them wouldn't have been able to,

you know, capitalize on it.

They wouldn't have had the bullshit.

And once that movie came out, it was impossible for him to be a heel because it was such a big deal.

And it may have been, you know, for some people, it was one of the highlights of the movie.

And he was a heel in the movie.

But he just blew it.

Remember that

Vern Gagne, when he brought him in,

he was a heel, and his manager was luscious Johnny Valiant.

That's right.

And the people shit on Johnny Valiant.

I was in the business by that point.

And Bachwinkle, as a matter of fact, was coming down to Memphis in 83.

I'm pretty sure that's, but because I'd always been a big fan of the Valiant brothers,

but it just, it didn't work.

And people were cheering him anyway, but they were ignoring Johnny Valiant.

And I'm sure the babyfaces were like,

Yeah, what the fuck?

Don't book me with this fucking guy.

You bury me.

I don't know what to do.

When I was younger, and I would see footage of Johnny Valiant as a manager, like throughout the 80s, that was one of those moments where I would say, One day I'll be an adult, and these promos will make sense.

And they still make no sense.

I have no idea what he's saying, why he's saying it, or what it's about.

See, here's the thing:

just as a side note here, and then we'll move on.

The Valiant Brothers worked because Jimmy was the valiant brother and Johnny played off Jimmy.

And Johnny was just saying a lot of those incomprehensible things in between Jimmy taking breaths.

And remember how the chain gang, remember Don Fargo and when they were the Dillinger and Frank, Frank Dillinger, when they did those promos in Indianapolis?

It kind of worked as long as Jimmy was there.

But when Johnny was talking on his own, he was just still doing the shit that he used to do in between the guy that was talking to you for real.

When it was Johnny and Jerry, you're like, oh, I hope Lou Albano speaks up here.

Yes, and someone needs to stop this.

But nevertheless, back to

82.

Back to 82.

So now Hogan's making a tremendous amount of money to begin with: 82, 83.

In

he's in the AWA.

He's in goddamn

Japan, the high-profile matches, the stuff with Inoki, and he's probably already one of the highest paid guys because they're selling out in Minneapolis.

And

it was the biggest business they ever did in AWA history, 82, 83, all on the back of Hulk.

I shouldn't say all, but a lot of it on the back of Hulk Hogan.

It really was a package in a lot of ways.

But Hulk Hogan was the one who really boosted things.

He started,

you know, I don't know when he started making $10,000 a week in Japan, you know, in 83, but think about how much money that is.

He was making that much money in 83 and then flying to Minnesota where they already had a light schedule.

I mean, he was really living the life at that point.

Well, yeah, that's why Bachwinkle stayed in Minnesota for 15 years, well, 20 years, whatever it was, because they only worked 15 days a month and they were mostly big, big towns.

And around this period of time, he had started dating Linda, the future Linda Hogan.

She was from Southern California, but I believe she moved with him to Minneapolis after he proposed her or whatever it was.

So, I mean, everything is kind of coming together.

The AWA is obviously feeling like everything's great.

And right around this same period of time, Vince McMahon Jr., a lot of people didn't realize he was already in charge.

He had already bought the company, starts making his moves.

And, you know, we've talked about it a lot in the past.

The options, who's going to be the guy to go national with?

You need a guy.

Is it going to be Backlund?

No way.

Snooka?

Snooka had just killed his girlfriend and before that had beat her up and beat up a bunch of dogs and cops in a hotel.

Probably a disqualifier.

Probably a disqualifier.

Vince has said himself recently in his documentary and years ago, he told Brian Solomon in an interview he conducted in like 2003 or 1, whatever it was, it was Dusty.

If it wasn't going to be Hogan, it wouldn't have been Kerry von Erich.

Couldn't get Kerry von Eric, to be honest with you.

It was going to be Dusty.

Dusty also had a lot of options on the table.

He would go book for Jim Crockett a year later.

He was already a touring attraction outside of the Florida territory.

But Hogan, if you look at the way the decade would proceed and the things that would happen and the look, Hogan was certainly the right guy for Vince McMahon Jr.

at that time.

Oh, yeah.

And he knew it.

And while working for the AWA is when he sent Steve Taylor to make his move.

Well, and the photography.

It was good.

to,

yeah, yeah.

I was outside of that.

Well,

it might have been Steve Taylor, the plumber.

Steve Taylor may have done some plumbing before he became a photographer.

But here's the thing: it was always going to be somebody first and foremost that could talk

with Vince Jr.

Because I know somebody's going to, oh, well, Jesus Christ, Dusty Rose didn't look anything like Hulk.

Well, Vince has said that in the interviews that you mentioned, but also it's common sense

that Vince went for the charismatic, for the package of charisma.

Can this guy, Dusty Rhodes was at that time one of the top,

certainly two or three or four box office attractions.

I don't know who was bopping around right at that point in time.

But he could talk.

even though he looked nothing like Hulk.

But you know that

Hulk being able to talk not as well as Dusty at that point and probably ever, you know, on any kind of consistent basis, but the look

was more of what Vince was, even at that point in time.

Vince was fancying himself somewhat of a physical fitness freak.

And

so

that was how, because we wanted superstar Billy Graham, but Billy Graham was too old and had broken down.

So,

but that was the thing is, if there hadn't been a Hogan,

there wasn't really a lot of other choices for a charismatic guy that could talk people in unless you were going for Dusty.

Maybe, maybe at that point, Austin Otto would have said, excuse me,

I'm terribly sorry, but I'm over here.

This money smells nice.

And I've...

I've got the gym membership.

But anyway.

But it's in a remarkable series of events that happened at the end of 83.

Right before Starcade, which Hogan was originally supposed to be on, or at least he was billed as being on.

He was in the program.

He was in the program.

I've got it.

But right before that, Vince and Hogan already have their deal.

Hogan's going to Japan.

Stole his billed for a bunch of shows with the AWA throughout Christmas and into early 84.

Vince has a dinner.

Apparently, him and his wife and Harley Race and his wife.

I don't actually, I don't know if Harley's wife was there.

It was at least Vince and Linda with Harley,

which leads to a

feeling.

I have a feeling if Harley's wife at the time was there, she would have double-legged Vince.

Apparently, Vince McMahon in the bathroom after Harley Race turned him down.

He wanted Harley Race to jump to the WWF with the NWA title and lose to the WWF champion, whoever it may be.

Harley refused, didn't want to hurt the NWA, possibly even more, didn't want to hurt Ric Flair.

But he also owned a piece of the Kansas City office.

Vince McMahon allegedly tried to take him down in the bathroom.

Well, hold on, because it would not only have been Harley, you know, just double-crossing one person or one company or whatever.

As the champion, he'd known all these people for so many years.

His word had always been good.

He had a piece of one company while he was the entire alliance's champion.

So he looked at Vince and they were in the bathroom.

As you said, he says, see that mirror?

He said,

I got to look at that face every morning when I get up in the mirror and turned him down that way.

Just no.

And as he's walking out, he says, and,

you know, truthfully, I don't see Harley being much of a fucking fabricator.

Said that Vince tried to double leg him and fucking take him down.

He said, what the fuck are you doing?

And that didn't end, you know, it ended quickly.

And, but Vince's feelings were spurned

because he wanted to kill the NWA.

That was his chance to kill the NWA, and he had already made his move to kill the AWA.

He had Hogan.

Vern Gagne didn't know.

Vern Gagne ends up getting a telegram from Hogan, I'm not coming back while he's in Japan.

Again, Christmas shows coming up.

These were big shows they had after the biggest year they ever had.

You can say, in a sense,

Hulk Hogan was the first person to really take Vince McMahon seriously.

Because Vince McMahon, when he hit him up and said, I'll make you a million.

You'll be the first wrestler to make a million dollars a year.

I'm going to merchandise the hell out of you.

Hogan could have said, well, this guy's not done that for anyone ever.

Can he really do it for me?

This was the announcer.

This was Vince's son when I was there.

Well, but hold on now, because

you phrase it a different way.

Hogan believed in Vince, but not the first one to take him seriously.

Harley took the offer seriously.

He just didn't want to take it.

And

I think while a lot of people laughed at Vince that he was going to take over the world,

at the same point, a lot of people in the business knew that the guy that was that owned the largest grossing territory already in the business, because he had New York and Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore, he can pay me more money probably than where I'm working now.

I will take this guy seriously,

but

potentially not seriously enough to stab my business partners in the back or whatever and some of those type of deals.

But yeah,

a lot of people took Vince seriously as being able to pay them.

They didn't, I don't think many of them believed he was going to take over the goddamn wrestling world in the next 10 years or whatever, but they knew he could pay them a wonderful amount for a short period of time.

And there were no contracts at that point in time.

So nobody was looking for, oh, he'll bring me in to sign me up and I'll be set for three years with a big guarantee.

That didn't exist.

But Hogan,

think about this.

He knows what he's done in the Midwest.

And if you can draw 18,000 people in Minneapolis, St.

Paul, if the goddamn promoter of Madison Square Garden is pushing you hard, where all the networks are located, where all the fucking media comes out of, where your main event in Madison Square Garden, if you sell that son of a bitch out, then you, then you get to be a movie movie star, which happened.

I'm not talking about getting a part in a Stallone movie.

I'm talking about being the star of the movie.

He knew he would have gone with Vince anyway, because that was the key to being the

better to get a chance as the top pushed guy in Madison Square Garden than to never

appear in the garden at all, right?

So it wasn't, I don't even think that Hogan would have ever dreamed what was going to happen and happen,

but he knew that that was a fucking dream spot,

worked well for Bruno.

And if Vince hadn't expanded nationally, he still had

Hogan could have worked goddamn any number of days he wanted to work for crowds of five to ten thousand, fifteen, twenty thousand a night.

So it wasn't like it was a goddamn gamble.

And it was the big change in a lot of ways that would happen to the wrestling industry around the back of Hulk Hogan in terms of merchandising.

There had always been t-shirts, had always been magazines, programs, different things.

But on the back of Hogan, because he looked like a superhero or an action figure, in the era of He-Man, He-Man had just come out a couple years before that.

Hogan, before they even got to the figure deal, t-shirts, bandanas, calendar, the yellow fingers, which were kind of, you know, ubiquitous throughout that era.

The yellow finger in the air for Hulk Hogan.

You know, lots of other wrestlers were in the line of LJN wrestling superstars and had t-shirts, but it was the Hulkamania shirt was everywhere.

I knew someone years ago was a family member.

He was wearing a Hulkamania shirt.

I said, Where'd you get that?

Oh, it was my girlfriend's.

What?

Like, who's she?

It was just something in the culture.

And eventually those figures come out.

And,

you know, again, he was, there were lots of stars and there were lots of people merchandise, but he was the big one.

And it even starts before Vince.

That was the other interesting thing because of Rocky Rocky III.

There were Hogan puppets.

There were Hogan figures.

There were all these things.

And then the cartoon hits.

And it was a perfect storm of merchandising and of pop culture sensibility breaking out.

And then chokes out Richard Belzer, hosts Saturday Night Live, all over MTV, comes out to Eye of the Tiger before Survivor shut that down.

You know, all these things happening.

And it was kind of, you know, if you look at any Hogan stuff from 84 and 85,

it feels right for that era.

I know I'm saying this to you, and you were doing other things in 84 and 85.

Well, no, I know what you mean.

I acknowledge it.

And truthfully, that was when

for me, wrestling began its descent into entertainment madness, but you can't deny the

money that was made and the popularity.

And

at that point,

for a while, the rising tide did lift all the boats because the hotter that one got, the hotter the other would get.

And it was somewhat legitimate competition, which happened from what,

only from 85 to 88 and 97 to 99, and in that whole fucking schmear.

Yeah.

And then Vince goes into Minnesota.

He has Hogan against the AWA.

AWA still remained pretty hot throughout 84 and the 85.

They had the Road Warriors come in.

They still had a lot of big stuff happening, but all of a sudden, Hogan and Mean Gene are in the main event.

I mean, that was a big deal, and Hogan was the big deal for WWF in California.

That was when they started their California push in 83, but they got Hogan in 84.

Well, I can tell you that, especially in the Southeast,

and Bo James had just tweeted earlier.

I saw that in the Tri-Cities area and the East Tennessee area, they came in a couple of shows with Hogan sold out Freedom Hall in Johnson City.

If Hogan then wasn't on the card after that, it was, you know, 500 people.

They did well in Louisville here when I think they, it was 85, I think, by the time they got here.

But with Hogan, they'd draw a crowd.

Otherwise, nobody gave a shit.

And, you know, with the established southern territories, they couldn't really draw the same thing with

Mid-South or, you know, the Dallas territory or whatever.

If Hogan was there, it was a success, but otherwise, they weren't going to go see the non-local wrestling.

I mean, he was a name that broke out beyond wrestling fans.

You know, a casual person would know who Hulk Hogan was because of all the attention over a few years there.

The same way, like the word wrestlemania.

I used to hear, especially in the 80s, people would use that word, like, oh, are they going to have a wrestlemania?

They would say that for a house show, you know, it was like things that were getting introduced into the culture and was really blowing up.

You know, not to go too far ahead, you brought up the movies before.

No Holds Bard came out when I was nine in 1989.

I had just become a big wrestling fan.

I went with my neighbor to see it.

Both of our parents refused to go.

So it was the first movie I got dropped off for.

My parents and his parents both said, we're not sitting through this movie.

And they were right.

It was the first movie in my life I saw.

And I'm like, this is bad.

I realized Kogan was a terrible actor in that movie.

He would get better.

He was certainly better actually as an actor on wrestling than in movies.

But that movie was atrocious.

And that was the focus of the WWF in the summer of 89.

Well, nevertheless,

I mean, everybody knows.

I think

we can assume that everyone listening knows what happened in the 80s and then the 90s.

Where were you when WrestleMania 3 happened?

When did you first see it?

You've asked me this before, and I can't remember what answer I gave you, except it's not like I bought the pay-per-view.

I believe I was somewhere that day, but obviously we heard about it and the crowd and et cetera.

But I would have to think it was probably

a few weeks later, whenever Norman Dooley might have sent me the VHS tape.

But, you know, that's,

that's the thing is, is

we've recognized, okay,

we've got all this great television.

We're selling out these other places.

And we, I'm talking about Crockett, we're selling out all these places.

We've got this great television.

We've, you know.

The talent roster up and down is comparable.

And look at the difference in the, in the in-ring, you know, ours is superior.

But Jesus Christ, they're getting these people on network television.

They're getting these people on a tonight show.

They're getting these people on, they're putting them in stadiums.

It was somewhat demoralizing, but it, you know,

we recognize that, my God,

we can't compete with, you know, they're on NBC once every Saturday or once a month on Saturday night.

It's like, I didn't, I didn't realize that we were going to

get bought out by people with all the money in the world instead of poor old little Jimmy Crockett and then fucking it all go to shit.

I thought it would go to shit while we were with Jimmy Crockett.

But,

you know, sooner or later, it was something was going to go to shit.

You know, of course, we bring up Andre and we talked a lot about it.

I'm sure everyone's talking about everything with WrestleMania 3, which to me, to this day is still like the biggest event.

I still mark out watching that video the entirety of that card, every bad match and all.

I love that whole show.

But then they did the thing with him and Savage, which was a pretty long build.

They become friends.

Savage becomes a babyface.

The mega powers form.

Savage wins the world title.

Hogan disappears to make his movie.

And then the big turn or series of events that led to it.

On Saturday night's main event again.

Your former protege, Big Bubba, the big boss man in Akeem, managed by Slick against the Mega Powers.

And they have this big breakup.

It's pretty embarrassing how it happened live where they didn't get the right time cue.

And Brutus beats.

That's where he's supposed to be praying over Elizabeth's near-dead carcass.

And he looks up on NBC television and says, Give me a count.

Something of that nature.

That's right.

That's right.

Count me in, brother.

But it led to what was for a long time the biggest pay-per-view ever: WrestleMania 5, Atlantic City, 700-something thousand pay-per-view buys.

And he beats Randy Savage, but it begins just a long trend of him crushing Randy Savage.

He kicks out of the elbow and then just immediately beats.

But that seemed to be a pattern.

And, you know, I guess you got to kind of have to mention a little bit of the Randy Savage-Hulk Hogan

relationship, frenemy, friends at times.

It would end up being a big part of the story from what happened with the eye at WrestleMania 9 to them working together.

You know, again, in WCW too, you know, Hogan's always said that he ran into Savage at the doctor's office right before Randy Savage died and they made up.

But it ends up becoming a pretty big relationship, a pretty big friendship at times in the life and career of Hogan, the Randy Savage one.

Well, and that's

that was like

what years, 88, 89?

88, they team up, 89, they're feuding.

Okay, yeah.

Even when I got there in 93, Bruce used to hold that up to me as an example of Vince's long-term booking, how he liked to have, he liked to go a year out and then work backwards.

And we planted seeds and it was months later than

all this stuff and everything.

And my thing to him was, where'd that fucking guy go?

He's changing shit we did two weeks ago.

That's right.

But they, but they did, you know, plot that thing out so carefully.

And it was two dynamic personalities.

We talked about Savage not long ago.

You know, even though he was smaller in stature than Hogan, he had the fucking physique, but he had the intensity.

And you believe that guy is, you know,

nut.

And it was the very modern version of Mad Dog Vashan only being five foot six, but really, you know, being somebody would.

bite your fucking face off.

And so they bought that.

And Savage could, he was the, again, the

equal at least of Hogan at promos, if not better.

But

Vince always favored guys with the personalities that could talk and with the charisma.

And then

the bodies didn't hurt in Vince's eyes because that was one of his personal interests to take that statement as you might want to.

You know, and it's right after this period of time, in my opinion, as someone who lived through it, that you start to see the crinkles of the fans, some fans, having changing opinions of Hogan.

The Ultimate Warrior, for me and all my friends, became way more popular than Hulk Hogan in 89, when he was doing stuff with Zeus.

Ultimate Warrior was feuding with the Heenan family.

It was a lot better.

Then they have the match.

Warrior wins.

Even as a kid, it felt like this is the start of a whole new thing.

They changed the intro to Superstars, where it was like a weird time travel through rocks, and there's the Ultimate Warrior at the end with lasers coming out of his eye.

It was just, they made it all about him.

But Hogan came right back, and he did the feud with Earthquake, where Earthquake injured him.

And then they had the match at SummerSlam, where they had Rick Rude versus the Ultimate Warrior in a cage.

And I think the Warrior took Hogan's popularity down a little bit.

And then the Slaughter Hogan thing.

You know, I've said this before.

There was something there there to be done.

It didn't need to involve anything with the Iraq war.

If Sergeant Slaughter, who to kids like me was a major babyface, not from wrestling, but from G.I.

Joe, he was all over that show, his action figures, the G.I.

Joe movie.

If he had been the heel Sergeant Slaughter that he was in mid-Atlantic wrestling without any of the Iraqi connection or hoo-ha

against Hulk Hogan as

the biggest star of this company 10 years ago and this

fucking nationally recognized figure versus Hulk Hogan.

It couldn't have drawn any worse than what they did, right?

Right.

See, I think they should have brought him back as a babyface because that's what everyone of that generation knew him as at that point for the last six years, let's say.

and have him turn on Hogan.

You know, the guy who comes out to I'm a real American gets turned on by Sergeant Slaughter.

Who's the real American?

Instead, it became the Iraq War thing, which beyond the tastelessness of it that everyone had a problem with at the time, the war ended in two minutes.

So there was no war.

But backing up also, you made an interesting point with Warrior, and because you were the target group at that point in time, Vince Sr.

never liked to do.

babyface matches.

He did Bruno and Pedro.

I think he might have been talked into it.

72.

And it didn't draw.

It rained at Shea Stadium and he didn't want to do it again.

He actually refused

Bruno offering to work with Andre

flat out because he didn't want to hurt either one of them, because they were long-term attractions for him.

For the sake of one giant gate, he didn't want to do that.

With Vince, and I think

Vince thought that he could just build another superhero that would vanquish the previous superhero and then have Hogan hang around in the Bruno Living Legend status type of category because

he didn't learn the lesson possibly of

his father.

But that's the point is Hogan's first chip in popularity was when they did the big match with the other big babyface.

Even though Warrior wasn't as good, wouldn't last as long.

at that point that was the peak of his popularity and it naturally shifted some people away from hogan it just had to yeah and you know if you look at hogan in 84 or 85 and then you look at hogan in 90 or 91

he's always been a cartoon but he came to be more of a cartoonish version of himself speaking to little kids and everything as opposed to you know this wacky charismatic guy who you know the fans who got into him in minnesota wasn't just little kids it was everyone.

He was more condescendingly going through the Hulk Hogan motions than actually making the shit up for the first time as he went along.

Yeah.

So the Hulk Hogan who did record business with Paul Orndorf was a very different Hogan from the Hulk Hogan working with Sergeant Slaughter in 91.

Or, you know, again, another chink in the armor was

SummerSlam 91.

It's Slaughter and Adnon and Mustafa, Colonel Mustafa, the Iron Sheik, versus the Ultimate Warrior and Hogan with Sid Justice as the referee.

Jesus Christ, there's some ring wizards in that

combination there.

Poor Slaughter.

Warrior gets fired by Vince.

We don't see him again until WrestleMania the next year.

And they start building Sid, and then they do the Royal Rumble in January, the one that Ric Flair won, maybe the greatest Royal Rumble ever.

And Hulk Hogan pulls Sid Vicious out after he's eliminated, Sid Justice out after he's eliminated.

WWF later re-dubbed the audio so the fans were cheering Hogan.

The fans started booing Hogan.

And he disappeared right after that, after WrestleMania.

Of course, this is when the steroid scandal and the Arsenio Hall scandal and the Zaharian scandal and the Ringboy thing wouldn't really involve Hogan, but a lot of bad things were happening and getting into the newspapers.

And Hogan, right after WrestleMania, right after the return of the Ultimate Warrior, Hogan's gone.

But right at that point,

you started seeing more WWF fans than ever before not cheer him, cheer someone else.

And then when he returns a year later in 93 at the start of Raw,

he's much skinnier, doesn't have the same appeal.

And although Bret Hart

and the beginning of the new generation guys weren't really drawing, nothing was drawing, but they weren't really drawing.

The fans, in a lot of respects, did not want another Hogan run then.

And it felt forced and it didn't really take.

I know some fans loved him and thought it was great, but it was like a completely different vibe than everything else happening in the company.

Well, he looked different also at that point.

And he was trying to get more movie roles so he wasn't, you know.

For whatever reason, all the big guys feel like they have to, even The Rock had to lose weight at one point to go to Hollywood.

And this is, and this is maybe six months, a year before Thunder and Paradise started filming, too.

Yeah, but it also, it was getting old.

It was getting stale.

It was a little cartoony.

Everything was getting stale in wrestling.

But remember when Flair went in, what, 91?

I was talking to him before he had made the decision.

I said, Rick Rubin will give you.

10 grand a month.

Just make one show a month for us in Smokey Mountain.

you know i saw them at the garden flare and hogan well that that's the thing once that he got up there and started working with hogan

you know we know that that didn't pan out well they

they

regardless what you think about the booking and they didn't get a wrestlemania match etc

but what that did was actually start a little bit more chinking at hogan that's right

Because a lot of guys were flare guys and they, even the people not from the carolina territory or crockett strong towns they might have been watching tbs in butte montana

but if there was if they'd go to butte and have 5 000 people if there was four or five hundred that have been watching tv that thought ric flair was the coolest thing they ever saw and they never got to see him

they're cheering flair when he's working with hogan right yeah i saw them i want to say it was november 91 at the garden And it was the most amount of fans I've seen there that weren't Hogan fans.

Not that that there weren't a ton of Hogan fans.

I'm not trying to say that there weren't.

There were plenty of Hogan fans, but when Ric Flair, with Mr.

Perfect as his second, got a false finish win over Hogan,

there were a lot of people like me.

I was 11, who jumped up out of their seats cheering.

Because it's one of those moments where you're cheering the heel, technically, and you're looking around.

Other people are looking at you like you've got something wrong with you.

But you realize there's a whole lot of us that were all really happy that Ric Flair won here.

Well, and for people thinking, oh, oh, bullshit now, you know, you're just taking up for Flair.

Imagine

in 1991, the response if they'd have booked Hulk Hogan versus Ric Flair in the Omni for WCW.

That probably would have drawn a fucking house, too.

But a lot of people would have been cheering for,

you know, each guy because it would draw two

heretofore separate audiences with

the way WCW had been doing.

not a lot of people were going to the live events, but there were still people watching on television.

And historically, Ric Flair had been the big star.

But if you reversed the procedure and brought Hogan over, he would have brought a bunch of people.

And even if he was the heel, he would have brought a bunch of people with him.

That was the point:

in a four or five-year period there, besides the fact that Hogan is somewhat distracted and is kind of stale.

And like we said, for all the reasons why he didn't seem like the fresh thing, he's also, he's worked with the warrior and he's worked with Ric Flair and he's worked with people that are chipping away at, you know, where they're saying, yeah, we like the other guy.

Well, yeah.

And again, in 91, that version of Hulk Hogan was really geared towards kids.

Kids weren't his only fans, but it was geared towards kids.

Ric Flair comes in as the real world champion.

His whole fucking gimmick is, I'm going to come to your town and I'm going to out drink and out fuck everyone in your town.

Yeah.

He was the babyface to a lot of us.

I'm sorry.

He was.

He was.

He was a lot cooler in 91, 92 than Hogan.

They should have done a WrestleMania match.

I love Ric Flair and Randy Savage at WrestleMania 8, but it should have been Hogan and Flair.

You know, I always wondered, because it drew

for them in that time, was it just because Hogan wouldn't be the complete babyface?

Was it that Vince didn't believe in Ric Flair?

But for whatever

Vince couldn't fully do an outsider angle and put somebody on the level.

And also, he did the same thing with Vader

in that he insisted on putting guys together in house shows all over the country where the most ardent fans had seen it before they would meet on pay-per-view.

And it was a whole different time than we can go down that rabbit hole.

But the point being

is that

I think at that point in time,

you know, like you said, Flair was just, to some other people, was a little fresher, especially on a national stage.

But Hogan was drooping and all that.

The point I was going to make was in any other,

in any other situation or era in wrestling or with other personalities,

the Booker would have just switched him heel.

But you almost

couldn't do that.

And or he wouldn't have

done it because,

what was it, it, four years later, or three years later, or whatever, he had to be talked into it.

So it was better.

He went away and people started to miss him.

But, you know, he came back before people missed him too much in 93.

And again, that was only a short period of time.

You came in right after that match with Yokozuna at King of the Ring with that weird finish with the photographer and the flash.

And that's the last time we see Hogan on TV for a while, or for WWF TV, especially.

Well, and then again,

there's where he screwed Bret Hart.

That was supposed to be Bret Hart's whole deal.

And I mean, we're not spreading bad stories about Hulk Hogan.

This has been publicly accepted fact that he said, no,

Brett's not going to be the champion.

I'll do this and that.

And with Yoko and a boom.

And then right after that, because he was doing New Japan stuff, I think maybe he worked with Muda in 93.

I got to go back and look.

But he does an interview on New Japan TV and he says the WWF title is just a toy.

This is the real belt I want, the IWGP.

And then allegedly, they called him on it in the office, and he denied that it ever happened.

It was on video.

The video was out there.

But it didn't happen because it was in Japan.

It was on one of those missing days that happen when you travel back and forth.

Yes, that day didn't exist.

But then Thunder and Paradise becomes his post-wrestling project, and it gets, you know, it gets a lot of stations.

It's a syndicated show.

And while making that show, Ric Flair, I guess Eric Bischoff goes to Ric Flair, and Ric Flair says he can get him to Hogan.

And Ric Flair links the two up, and that changes the history of WCW there.

Hulk Hogan gets one of the most lucrative deals for any wrestler ever.

And

he's the biggest star to sign with WCW.

And it takes a while.

The pay-per-views recover, but it takes the NWO angle and the heel turn to change everything.

Well, yeah, because we were laughing at first because

with the contract that they signed, the fanfare they bought it brought him in as the big baby face, the savior of wrestling.

And

we used to joke at that point that they lose money.

And I think they were when we saw the numbers broken down, they would lose money on every Hulk Hogan t-shirt they sold.

By the time they paid to have it made, they paid somebody to sell it, and they fucking did whatever the fuck and then give him the cut.

It was costing them money.

And

the people didn't really want to see him as the big baby face.

And it didn't really spark their business.

But

as you said, you know,

once that the right angle came along that he was the perfect person for,

you know, that was a different story because

Nash and Hall were always going to draw in that initial run

because the people really believed that they were WWF guys coming to fuck with the WCW guys.

But because Hogan then turned and got all the extra attention and it clicked, that's what kicked the whole thing off.

But it, and also, they were WWF icons.

It still looked like a promotion versus promotion thing that was the

only thing at that point in time that people still really fucking believed was real.

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You know, it becomes the hottest thing.

It changes WCW's business.

But look at one year earlier.

You know, Hogan.

As corny and cartoony as he got in the end of his WWF run, it was all the way hammed up in WCW while he's feuding with the Dungeon of Doom.

That famous segment.

I forgot about that.

That famous segment where he walks in, and I remember what he says.

He touches the water.

It's not hot.

There are no hokamaniacs here.

Who are you?

Who are you?

It's just, it's the most ridiculous acting.

And a lot of it was apparently Kevin Sullivan as a booker trying to get Hogan's trust.

Trust me, I'm not going to do anything to mess up your character.

Let's do some interesting things.

They had to first do all that.

Of course, the Zodiac, Brother Brutus, Brother Brutai, would be a part of the Dungeon of Doom.

Or Bruti?

Or whatever he was.

All this is going on.

Jimmy Hart's there.

You know, a lot of people Hulk Hogan's comfortable with are in WCW.

Gene Okron comes in in 93.

Bobby Heenan, Randy Savage comes in after him.

They get Elizabeth back at the beginning of Nitro.

Nitro starts in the, what, September 95.

It was a very interesting period of time.

And then Hogan, who allegedly did not want to turn heel,

was finally,

they were trying to talk him into it he said no and then he finally saw how big it was going to get or it was yeah and he realized i need to take advantage of this moment and he did and it was see that's the thing he he was smart to get himself into things at at the proper times and

you know i can see with his success that he had had

him thinking, I can never be a heel again.

But at the same time, when he was seeing possibly the lack of success he was having compared to the success he'd had, he said, and these guys are hot and they're a little younger and they're fresher and this could be a thing.

And then boom and on and on, then my personality will still overshadow everybody else.

So look at me.

But it worked.

And again, he had a killer deal.

I have here someone in the Culture Cornette group posted this earlier.

This is

the first page of the letter of agreement from 98 between WCW and Hulk Hogan.

So, again, he got there in 94.

They renewed the agreement, I think, in 96.

So, this is 98

based on May of 98.

It's at a period of time where Hulk Hogan has leverage and WCW is rolling.

And according to this, the term would be from 98 through May 2002.

The bonus here, in consideration of Boleya's performance hereunder, WCW shall pay Boleya a bonus in the amount of $2 million

to be paid within 14 days after the execution and delivery of this letter of agreement.

He will promote and appear and wrestle and perform six pay-per-views during the year

one through three,

and he will be the featured wrestler at each event.

In consideration for the pay-per-view appearances, WCW shall compensate him 15%

of 100%,

so 15% of what comes in of domestic pay-per-view cable sales received by WCCW

or

a $675,000 guarantee payment per event.

So whichever number is better.

Whichever is greater.

WCW shall also pay him $1,350,000 on July 1st, November 1st, and February 1st of years one through three.

So again, this is just page one.

This doesn't even go into creative control and merchandise and everything else.

It was a fantastically lucrative deal for Hulk Hogan.

And it helped get the company to the point they were at at this point in 1998.

But, and that was from 1998 to 2002?

Yeah.

It probably didn't work too well for him in 2000.

That's what I'm saying.

You know, it was one thing to get to this point, but, and he wasn't, he had the best deal, but he wasn't the only person with a great deal.

And a lot of these deals are what ended up hurting WCW to the point that it died.

Well,

that was easy to sign those deals when you're making $50 million, but when you lose $50 million, or was it $60 million?

I'm sorry, in 2000, then those

dimmer the deals what try men's souls.

Yeah, and the WCW run, you know, again, we've talked about it in the past and the Goldberg match, which

went from not being a match to being a dark match to Hogan seeing that it was going to draw and the Turner executives being there to becoming the biggest drawing match in in WCW history on free TV.

And it was a big deal.

I mean, we just talked about Goldberg retiring.

That match is one of the reasons why Goldberg is a big deal.

And Hogan put him over because he realized it was the best thing for him to do.

You know,

how often do you say that about Hogan?

Hogan realized the best thing I could do in front of all these executives and this big house is put over Goldberg.

Well, because in the end, all the executives were patting him on the back for drawing it when they sold most of the the tickets in advance to begin with.

And

he wasn't even on the card.

He wasn't even there.

But

that's the thing is that, again, he knew when to put himself in the right place.

All these

instances in the wrestling business.

How did he go so wrong in his own personal life with not knowing how to put himself in the right places at the right times?

You know, again, he's still working for the WWF in the early 2000s after his WCW.

Well, I guess towards the end of it, he came in in, what, 2002?

No, he waited, because remember, he had one of the contracts that even when WCW went out of business, was sold, whatever the fuck,

Turner Broadcasting or whatever the corporate entity was had to pay him the rest of his contract.

That's why several of those top guys did not migrate over to WWF until 2002

because they were still getting paid to sit on their ass at home and he comes back they bring back the nwo vince brings them in

and he has that match with the rock which steals wrestlemania it's a match that everyone talks about to this day it's such an amazing match i forgot somebody just retweeted we did a watch-along of that that's right

and it's i assume on the YouTube channel where people could avail themselves of it if they so desire.

But yeah, where he completely, again,

he outworked the rock.

I mean, psychology and with knowing what to do and et cetera, you know, that

they had to completely flip around with the little things that,

you know, that would have been ahead of rock at that point in time in his career.

Yeah, and he does interesting things.

I mean, he ends up teaming with Edge.

I think they win the tag titles.

He becomes the masked Mr.

America.

He has a match with Vince McMahon.

I mean, it was a lot of really interesting things.

And then he was gone again.

And around this period of time, before TNA, and that's a whole nother story, I'll let you talk about that.

But this really began the demystification of Hulk Hogan.

That reality show starts.

And you start seeing him with his family.

And they do a ton of media together.

I remember them on Howard Stern, you know, together.

But I think people seeing Hogan and his family

didn't make everyone a bigger, didn't make a lot of people want to see more of them.

And then eventually, when the scandal hits with Bubba the Love Sponge's wife, again, that comes on the heels of seeing this guy and his family and his wife and his son all over the place for years.

And then his son gets into the accident where that other kid gets messed up.

It was a series of bad events outside of wrestling.

And then inside of wrestling, there's TNA, there's that Australia tour with him and Flair having those matches where they busted each other up.

But you were there right before he got to TNA.

Well, and also, none of those did any favors as you said and the i think especially the reality show familiarity with those people bred some level of contempt they're just like enough is enough of these people right yeah and in a lot of ways hogan became

like the ultimate florida man

You know, you always hear these stories, Florida man did this, Florida man did that.

He was like the king of Florida man because he was all about being based in Florida.

Anyone who was a big mocker in the Tampa Clearwater area, they knew him.

I mean, I watched a documentary not too long ago about Lou Perlman, the guy who ended up stealing all the money from a variety of people.

He managed to backstreet Boys and Insync.

And I guess for a time, Brooke Hogan.

Hogan's all over that documentary, not being interviewed, but just in clips from being around.

He became almost like a local celebrity there, separate from being a national celebrity.

But that's the point I was going to make is, you know, you mentioned that at the same time, the Australia tour and the guy had a lot of money.

But, you know,

Rick and Hogan both,

at that point, I think they were at the time where people didn't want to see them rolling around bleeding anymore.

And enough is enough.

You guys have reached an age at some point where this must come to an end.

And it wouldn't.

It did for Hulk Wigger and it did for Rick.

But

the,

i said when we were talking about the tna agent reports that i've been pulling out of the files and other things tna stories lately that without having any idea anything was going to go on with hulk hogan

uh i told terry taylor i said you couldn't even wait till i hear ferrara's coming or i would have quit when hogan and bischoff came in the next month anyway right and well

Why would you have quit with Hogan and Bischoff coming in, not again?

Well, I wasn't fond of Eric because of that previous brief interaction in WCW, but I didn't know anything about Hulk Hogan as a person.

But I knew that, no, this cause is lost.

Jeff Jarrett's gone, Dutch Mantel's gone.

They've already been burying these young guys that are hungrier, easier to work with, more exciting.

And the creative already sucks.

And now it's going to be a Hogan-Bischoff thing when,

I mean, truthfully and honestly, as we've seen for 25 years, that was his MO.

When Hogan comes in, all of his friends come with him.

It's just at that point, all of his friends was 20 years older.

And with Bischoff, the feedback that I'd always gotten on Eric Bischoff and still have to this day from anybody whose opinion about

creating or booking or promoting wrestling that I respect is that Eric Bischoff knows a lot about sales and talking to TV people, and you would be astonished at what Eric Bischoff doesn't know about wrestling.

So I wouldn't have wanted to, and as the product bore out,

they had just got to the point, I believe, where they were either about to or almost had, or maybe even did in TNA break even

there in the fall of 2009, and

it went downhill from there and has only recently resurged 15 years later.

He has a WWE satellite, which is what it needed to be, I guess, to succeed.

But that was the whole.

Well, yeah, but it didn't need to be the satellite of Bischoff and Hogan Hervey fucking enterprise.

That's the thing.

It was the whole idea that Bischoff and Hogan were coming in to save things or coming in to, you know, make things big again.

And we're going to have a live show where we'll go opposite Raw.

We'll have all these stars and Jeff Hardy and the nasty boy.

It didn't work.

It didn't feel right

well here's the thing at that point and and

hogan

is one of those guys that his personality was so big and his reputation was so big and his he he the magnitude of him right

that you needed to get him out of the way to get other people over that it

that if he was too old at the time to be a top in-ring talent, but he overshadowed in a lot of cases the other guys they were trying to use.

You see what I'm saying?

And also, it was just old at that point.

It was just stale.

It was done.

And they have that last image of him leaving while dragging Dixie Carter, who's hanging onto his leg, and then he never comes back.

He goes back to WWF.

Then the scandal breaks out.

He's gone.

They remove him from the Hall of Fame for a few years.

He comes back.

He gives that speech to the locker room that does not go over well well

because he did not apologize.

And,

you know, he's kind of been an on and off presence over the last few years.

It's crazy to think the last appearance he had was when he got booed out of the building in LA,

which in a lot of ways was a tone-deaf appearance that WWE put him out there.

Yeah.

But, you know, he got booed.

And then he did an interview with Ariel Hilani where he said, of course I did.

I was Hollywood Hogan out there with everything.

No, he wasn't.

I mean, he lied about it.

Jimmy Hart was waving an American fucking flag.

They're like, fuck you.

Fuck out of here.

But, and that's the

between the lack of apologies and the continuing revelations of, well, this wasn't true.

And remember, he ripped his shirt off and said Donald Trump was his hero.

And

that caused a lot of people to start taking a piss on him.

Yeah, that was like six months or so before Ross.

So that was in the air.

That's right.

It oh, it was in the air like one of Andre's farts.

And then, and I assume he's one of the people that

his wife or one of his wives or some blonde person that he has married has led him to God also because he's been doing the

just over-the-top religious thing, which you can't take seriously from a guy that says he used to wrestle 500 times a year because he flew backwards from Japan.

But, you know, he was over the top with that, like he's over the top with everything else.

I think that it's just all those things have various, it's a cumulative thing, like it was when he was wrestling other babyfaces or people that

the fans liked when he's done things that a variety of people, maybe in small numbers, but like the who's down in Whoville, it gets louder.

Cumulatively, a lot of people said, I don't like this fucking guy anymore.

Yeah, and a few years ago, he got married, and the woman he married was apparently a big to-do in Scientology.

So a lot of people were thinking, like, oh, Hulk Hogan's going to become a Scientologist, which would have been amazing because he would have broken their whole audit system once they tried to interview him and get some real stories out of him or anything.

But, you know, she was apparently baptized with him a few years ago.

So it may have gone the other way.

He may have gotten her and.

Good lord.

brought her to him under the good lord, as you just said.

Oh, oh, good lord.

But, you know, he was still doing interviews.

I mean, that's one of the reasons we would always talk about him him is people would send us these interview clips where he's saying things that are just clearly not true.

But he's so committed to saying them that he could almost convince you.

And if you don't know anything, he would convince you.

And

random projects and products that would pop up.

Now there's the Hulk Hogan Real American beer commercials all over Raw and Real American Freestyle Wrestling.

Once again, him and Bischoff.

That was about to launch with him as the commissioner.

And there were just articles in the paper a month month ago, two months ago.

Him and partners bought a building or bought a storefront across from Madison Square Garden to open up a Hulk Hogan bar.

That's right.

I remember we talked about that at the time.

Or him and investors are looking to buy Hooters.

And, you know, we should say, because we talked about it.

I've been out there looking to buy a few Hooters in my time, but I didn't realize he was that frisky these days.

Oh, you mean the restaurant?

The restaurant chain.

And I believe it's also based in Florida, or at least originally.

But, you know, we talked about the Bubba the Love Sponge stories a few weeks ago when he started coming out.

I believe, again, the same market.

I believe it's still Tampa, saying that he was hearing that Hulk Hogan was on his deathbed.

Of course, they had a big falling out.

You have to say, it turns out he probably knew what he was talking about, a lot of these things.

We started hearing from people without exposing any sources.

A variety of people who seemed to, more than one person, who seemed to be aware based on what they were saying of certain things happening medically.

And it seemed to be a pretty grim picture.

They kept putting out positive statements.

I know Jimmy Hart the other day said that everything was fine.

He was doing karaoke with Nick the other night.

But it was clear that there were some really serious medical issues.

And,

you know, they said cardiac arrest.

You know, it hits suddenly.

And again, like I said, it's a conflicted feeling for a lot of us.

It's a very complicated legacy.

It's the character.

It's the important role the character played and the things that the character was a part of.

And then it's the real person who

at times, without being seemingly, without being malicious,

was an incredibly self-absorbed, self-obsessed Carney, for lack of a better term.

And it may have worked for him throughout his life, but It creates this situation where

an all-time legend, again, like you said at the very top of this, you know, taking Jim Landis out of the equation, the biggest star we've ever seen in this country for professional wrestling.

But there's a lot of conflicted thoughts when trying to evaluate and weigh what kind of guy he was.

Well, and,

you know, as you said,

It's the person and the gimmick, but I think this is a case where they became

the same thing.

I mean, it is not a new story in wrestling.

He spent almost 50 years

convincing people that he was Hulk Hogan, except during that lawsuit when he said, no, no, he's a completely different guy with a completely different penis size.

But he had to be Hulk Hogan.

And,

you know, we've always seen you don't get to be a big star without having a big ego.

Sometimes you have a big ego, you don't get to be a big star, but both can be trouble.

He

was somewhat of a Teflon guy, and that when he got in trouble in one respect, he would be bailed out from another,

you know, quarter coming in.

I think he got caught up in that and started believing his own shit and just felt like

that's who he has to be, maybe in public and

in private.

As I said, I don't know.

I'm looking from the outside because that's why I can say that I neither personally liked him or disliked him.

And as we've been able to have this conversation about what we saw, like everybody else saw.

But again, very few people ever have had or ever could have the impact he had on the professional wrestling business.

You bring up The Rock and Steve Austin, Jim Londis, Bruno San Martino, Ric Flair.

It's a very short list of the top tier in terms of star power, drawing ability.

It's a very short list.

And,

you know, he's in the conversation for top three.

You could argue if he's number one or where he is, but

undoubtedly the biggest star of the last 45, 50 years in this country, if not ever, for professional wrestling.

Oh, yeah.

I think, I think you can say

since the dawn of television, the, you know, the biggest star over

that checks all the boxes.

boxes but

anyway

we uh we don't take any pleasure in that we will we will miss taking the piss out of his stories because i'm pretty sure that us taking the piss out of his bullshit stories that he told and having fun with it never once affected any dollar that might come into his checkbook and or I don't know that he ever lost any sleep over it, right?

So I feel that our hands are clean.

Those are some of the most fun moments in the history of the show.

It's just us laughing, you know, as we're discovering these things of what he said.

Sometimes we play audio, sometimes we'd read quotes.

You know, Harley Race burned the ring down and then

shook his hand and asked for a job.

I mean, just crazy, crazy stuff.

I'm hanging out with Michael Jackson and Mr.

T at Wembley Stadium, just crazy things that don't necessarily add up.

But it was so much fun discussing any any of these things, his book, all these things.

And,

you know, or Ron Howard.

What's going to happen to Ron Howard down at the beach store?

Oh, I'm sure someone, whoever runs his estate, will have to keep these things open.

I mean, it's a valuable brand, you would think, going forward.

I mean, is it going to be a new broom sweeps clean, a new administration, or is Ron still going to be the ruler of the roost?

Does he have some kind of contract with

the future owners of the name, image, and likeness?

You know, who

I actually found myself thinking about two different people when I heard this news.

One was Brooke Hogan, just because they were just a series of articles about everything

between her and her mom had put out a video, I think, where she looked somewhat unhinged, ranting about

family issues.

And Brooke Hogan put out a statement and You know, I felt really good for her.

It just seemed like she was in a good place and had her own family and didn't want to be involved with her family's self-induced drama.

And I thought about her just because,

you know, obviously her and her dad were very close and they had issues.

And I, you know, whatever reason, it made me think of her.

And the other person was Jimmy Hart, who,

you know, so much of his life, seemingly, his career, has been the Hulk Hogan business since at least 93.

I mean, everything with him publicly is him dressed in the Hulk Hogan colors with the Hulk Hogan megaphone,

at times waving the American flag.

But, you know, he did a lot of things for Hulk Hogan and

it ate up, not in a bad way, but it ate up a lot of his time.

It was a lot of his life.

And I ended up thinking about him too.

Just, you know, I hope he's okay.

Well, yeah, and I do too.

If Jimmy is listening, and I hope to God you're not listening, Jimmy, I hope you're out busy like you usually like to be instead of sitting around listening to us.

But we hope you're okay also.

I've known Jimmy longer than Hulk has.

But yeah, that's the thing.

And

at the same time, Jimmy's always out doing his own stuff.

Jimmy's doing things that we never hear about or dream of, but he can't sit still from my

experience with him.

But they've worked together.

Hulk knew how valuable Jimmy was and how he could trust him, how he's honest, he's dependable.

He knows how to do promotion.

He's a workaholic.

And so they've been

had some type of professional relationship for

over 30 years now.

So, you know, I do feel bad for Jimmy because that's a, you know, a big part of his life, as you said.

The only one we don't feel bad for is Linda because she looks nuts.

I don't know.

She looked like fucking whatever happened to baby Jane material.

Well, maybe that's reason to feel bad enough, but Hulk Hogan, 71 years old, the face of wrestling for a lot of fans, for a lot of non-fans, and certainly a complicated legacy that we'll continue to discuss going forward

but in the meantime as as they say

thanks for the house hulkster eric bischoff tweeted that and i thought that was succinct and said it all because that's in the old days where you would go up to the guy in the main event and say thank you for the house because everybody made more money it was on the card because

You were in the main event.

That was the meaning of that before all this handshake shit started.

Guys wanted to be be on in the 80s, guys wanted to be on the Hulk Hogan shows.

WWF had three, sometimes four shows a night.

Guys really wanted to be on the shows with Hogan.

You knew you'd make more money.

And you knew what else you were going to see, don't you?

On those shows in the 80s with Hogan on top?

No.

The big boot.

Of course.

The big boot, baby.

And I'll tell you what, not to have a morbid transition, but this is broadcasting and we do have sponsors.

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Can I trade my worker?

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All righty.

Well, let's bear the brunt of the heavy lifting here.

Let's do the grunt work.

And before we go any further, let's try to lend some insight on before all of what we've just talked about happened.

uh yesterday for the past week we've been inundated

with the people asking us and sharing on social media the

video that they've released from the WWE Vault of an early match between Jerry Lawler and Randy Savage.

And I guess that's been about a week ago now, right?

About a week.

WWE Vault has been releasing a bunch of interesting things.

We talked about how they put up unedited Great American Bashes from various years.

Lots of rare footage, house show matches or dark matches that hadn't gotten out.

This one was a real surprise because it popped up kind of out of nowhere.

Yeah.

Apparently from the POFO slash ICW collection, whatever that entails, whenever WWE purchased it.

But it was a Savage Lager match that no one had seen before.

And most people,

if not everyone, except whoever worked there, couldn't even really truly identify the building.

They said it was one building, but no one was sure.

Well, and I've got some insight short of calling Randy Hales, but I actually didn't think it was important enough to bother him to say, hey, were you there on March 23rd, 1985 or whatever?

But

here's the light that I can shed on it and explain how this confusion started.

This was not an ICW event.

per se that this match was promoted on and shot at because ICW as a thing had ceased to exist probably a year beforehand.

It was

a Memphis show promoted off Memphis, you know, the Memphis crew.

I'm not saying that Angelo Pafo might not have been the local promoter, but here's the deal.

In

late 1983, as we've talked about, here on the program before,

Lanny Pafo had already left and he was working

preliminaries for Bill Watts and Mid-South Wrestling because he was there.

We worked with him first couple of weeks we were there in December of 83.

Mid-South had promoted that Randy Savage was going to be coming in also.

Angelo was closing down his promotion.

They couldn't make it anymore and he was trying to find jobs for his sons, right?

Well, but between the time that they taped the announcement of Randy Savage coming to Mid-South and the time that it would have actually happened, as we've talked about,

Bill Dundee, Watts decided to bring Dundee down as his booker in Louisiana.

Dundee wasn't obviously going to bring Savage in.

I don't think there was a lot of heat with Lanny, but, you know, Lanny was only a preliminary guy anyway in that environment.

So Angelo made a deal with Jerry Jarrett.

for them all to come to Memphis since Dundee was out of the way.

They could have the,

you know because of the heat between dundee and savage that everybody knows about that that they could have the lawler savage matches they'd been promoting for five years and do some business and lanny meant more

in that angle as the brother and angelo was their manager than he did just you know working underneath in louisiana

What happened was because ICW was on television still in a couple of different places,

Jared agreed to send the out-of-town tape of the 60-minute version of the Memphis show that Louisville and Evansville and Lexington everywhere got to fulfill Angelo's TV commitments.

That's how so many of those 1984

Memphis clips

still exist today because

Angelo kept anything that would be worth anything.

And a lot of that stuff was later into the Ron Martinez collection, PM Film and Tape, and Kit Parker licensed some of it for the Wrestling Gold series.

But point being,

one of the TVs that ICW and Papo had was Harrisburg, Illinois,

which I'm not sure if there's a station in the Cape Girardeau, Missouri market, or if it's served by Harrisburg, but nevertheless,

Memphis didn't run Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

That had been an ICW town like Paducah, Kentucky, Cape Girardeau, and the 64 corridor that we've talked about.

Angelo Pafo had tried it with Phil Golden's All-Star Wrestling in 73.

Same towns.

Came back to him.

It was close to southern Illinois where they were from.

So

Angelo

was promoting there, and a point I'm making is that even though Memphis didn't regularly go to Cape Girardo, they did go go to the boot heel of Missouri because the Memphis TV reached there.

So if they got the TV market in Harrisburg, it was just a little bit farther for the Memphis crew to go up.

And the show was in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

And Randy Hales was the ring announcer because at the time,

Randy was not only doing the TVs and

you know, be a general manager kind of role, but he would have been the ring announcer for anything in Jonesboro, Arkansas, or anything in Missouri, etc., etc., because that was the Memphis Inn.

So somebody had it right in that they found an ad for a show in Cape Girardeau, Missouri

in March of 1985, and

that fits it.

The date that they had had at the WWE vault on the tape, even though they couldn't figure out why it was there.

And probably,

since there's no commentary on it,

Angelo might have even been running the camera.

Who knows what the fuck?

They taped it.

Maybe they showed a few highlights on Memphis TV, but it was just a spot show match.

And that ended up with the tapes that Angelo Pafo ended up

selling or disposing of to Ron Martinez.

You want to hear the rest of the card?

Sure.

And by the way, it was a Sunday.

Where did the Memphis Territory typically run on a Sunday?

Except for Jackson, Tennessee, once a month when I was there nowhere.

So, see, it was a day off, and Angelo probably said, Hey, we draw a house here.

Have Randy work with Lawler.

So, Sunday, March 24th, 1985, Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Speedy Talltree defeated Larry Williams,

and Speedy Talltree is one of the sons of Tom Ronesto.

Tom Ronesto.

Yeah.

Billy Travis defeated Jack Attack,

whoever or whatever that is.

Patriots defeated Cruisers.

Good lord.

Speedy Taltree

working double beat Angelo Poffo.

There you go.

Plowboy Frazier in a handicap match defeated Patriots.

Lanny Poffo defeated Billy Travis.

It's almost formatted like a mini-taping.

I mean, a lot of these guys are working twice.

Battens defeated J.R.

Hogg in a handicap match.

And the main event, Jerry Lawler defeated Randy Savage.

You know,

maybe that Angelo was trying to keep the TV going

and wanted to tape something or whatever.

And it sounds, as you said, like it was a primitive TV taping, but as we saw, it was one camera in a stands.

And That wasn't even a full Memphis crew.

That was Lawler saying to fucking Frasier and Billy Travis

and Speedy Talltree was in the territory at the time, and maybe a couple of other guys: hey, let's go up here and work our off Sunday.

Angelo's going to run fucking Cape Girardo.

And Randy, you can

keep an eye on the box office, make sure we get a fucking legitimate count type of thing.

This is a week before WrestleMania 1, and this is, let's see, March, April, May, three and a half months or so before Randy Savage will go to the WWF.

But there you have it.

Mystery solved.

This

is a oh, and somebody said, and who the fuck is Tux Newman?

Tux Newman was Randy Savage's manager.

That was Scott Walton, the longtime or Jeff Walton.

No, you know what?

You know who Scott Walton is?

He's an old-time local CBS

fucking affiliate, WHAS

television personality here.

But Jeff Walton, Walton,

who was the longtime publicity agent for the Los Angeles office, had,

you know, because he wanted to dip his toe in the managing world and he got booked in Memphis to come out and be a manager, Tux Newman, for, I would say, a brief period of time.

They needed a manager.

This is right when Jimmy Hart left to go to the WWF right before WrestleMania 1, and they needed someone.

Jeff had been around the wrestling business for such a long time.

He had done so much for the Los Angeles office.

He had run the Freddie Blassey fan club as a fan and then got involved with the magazine end.

And Vince McMahon wanted Jeff to run what was Victory Magazine and became WWF magazine.

Jeff was one of the first people Vince picked.

I think Vince brought him to Connecticut.

He put Vince in touch with Theo Errett.

That's why there's a brief period of time where there are Theo Errett WWF photos, like in their magazines.

And then it didn't work out and he ended up doing some stuff with Norm Keitzer.

And then he wanted to be a manager.

It was something he always wanted to do.

Bleached his hair, became Tux Newman in Memphis.

And you have to say, he was actually pretty good.

He was good.

The blonde hair was a little much to take, knowing what he normally looked like in real life.

But he wasn't bad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And probably a little Freddie Blassie influence there.

He managed.

There's also footage of him managing for a California Championship Wrestling in the 80s, but it's unfortunate the business changed.

Otherwise, maybe he would have done more as a manager because he was pretty good.

But that's the explanation of that.

But Brian, let me ask you this.

Can you possibly explain to me why somebody has not told our old friend Flop Dollar to just calm down for he hurts himself?

or somebody else for that matter.

But so far, he's mostly trying to kill himself.

He's done it.

Remember the

dive over the top rope where he couldn't clear the top rope and did the flip, and everybody shared the clip and made fun of him, and et cetera.

Now he's figured out a way that he's guaranteed to clear the top rope.

He's using a ladder.

Did you see the

big bump from, or the two big bumps

from the TNA?

I get, was that on pay-per-views?

The big show, they drew 7,000 people in Long Island.

We'll talk about that in a second.

But

I didn't obviously watch it because I've been out of town and we're going to talk about that in a minute.

But the clip was all over Twitter.

He's on the ladder.

And another guy's on another ladder.

And the other guy is going to push them over, both of them over sideways together.

And the theory is,

ladies and gentlemen,

the theory is, is that as they think they're two dynamite kids, is what the theory is, but there's ladders

braced from the ring apron to the railing around the ring that keeps the fans back.

And each of these guys, as their ladder turns over, they're going to fall off the ladder, over the top rope, and land flat on these other ladders.

Brian, have I described that accurately?

And

has it come across as stupid as

it looked?

Again, I think you did.

I only saw the one clip.

You said there's two.

I only saw the one clip of the one ladder spot, which that was all I saw.

Well, yeah, well, but that's the thing is that they were going over.

And the one guy, whoever the other guy was,

he had the idea.

Because when the ladder tips over, as you get right to the tipping point, as they say,

you just kind of, you just push off, baby.

As Dusty would say, you just push off, baby.

You just kind of push off.

You're going to clear the top rope and you're going to land sideways or somewhat flat or stretched out on this goddamn ladder that's laid out flat.

And hopefully that will break your fall so you don't kill yourself on the floor.

And the one guy did it.

But old Flop Dollar.

The ladder, and you know how big and corpulent and fucking

disconnected his body parts look.

Anyway, he's gangly and awkward, and he's like, what, 6'6, and he's 300 pounds or whatever the fuck he is.

And he just looks unnaturally large for a middle-aged soccer dad.

And he thinks he's athletic, and that's where somebody has to intervene for his own safety.

The ladder is tipping over, and suddenly at the tipping point,

he jumps like he's trying to broad jump something.

Some invisible hurdle that he's clearing in midair, and he came down feet first

toward the ladder.

But

the ladder is just rungs.

There's holes in it.

So his both of his legs went through the goddamn ladder and he crotched himself on one of the rungs,

which

I think his legs caught him somehow.

So it's not like he neutered himself, but the thing bent and collapsed.

He could have broken both his legs.

His legs were stuck in the fucking ladder.

And

it looked like he was jumping off a bridge trying to commit suicide.

It was the most

obvious thing, right?

Like, I'm going to jump as far as I can now.

Well, again, I don't know if he thought out the ending.

That was the clip I saw.

I haven't really seen too much TNA or Top Dolla lately.

I hear he's doing big things.

Well, you'd have to, you'd have to, they had to walk through it or at least talk about it.

And somebody had to describe to him because the other guy did it right.

If you can say there's a right way to do it.

But then apparently the match went on.

And the second clip, he's on the ladder in the ring.

And there's four other guys behind him.

And he's about halfway up the ladder.

and he does a moonsault off the ladder and misses all four

guys

and it's just

somebody for his own safety needs to sit him down and say look dude

uncle phil

you can't do this

You're either going to kill yourself or you're going to land on somebody and kill them.

Who is telling him that he's capable of doing this shit?

You know, he's showing the business.

He's showing AAA, showing everyone, I'll do what it takes.

I'll jump off any cliff

or try to.

I'll do what it takes.

I'll sacrifice any opponent's health and safety.

You're focusing on his legs.

What about his dick?

I mean, he just came right down on the left.

That's what I was thinking.

Oh, he's going to crush his balls.

But no, because

he's some tall and long, gangly legged.

I think his feet hit the floor before it successfully castrated him, but that's the thing is his legs are stuck in the ladder at a high rate of speed.

Well, look, you got to give him credit for his consistency.

Obviously, he has found a niche.

You know, JP Smith in ECW

got a big bump on his head from a messed up dive, and all of a sudden, you fucked up became part of his gimmick.

He was a bumbling, stumbling guy.

Maybe that's what.

Well, I think we've successfully handed that gimmick off to a new generation.

Do you think Top Dolla will end up back on WWE-TV?

I can't see how.

Can you see how?

He's part of the stable with Trick Williams.

I guess that's a way,

possibly how.

Well, but

that doesn't mean they have to take all of the stable.

The old swayback mule can be left behind.

But they drew 7,000 people in Long Island.

Brian, and you're a New Yorker.

What's the matter with those people up there?

That's a big deal, and they deserve credit for that.

Long Island is a tough place to draw.

And for TNA to come in there and get that house, they deserve credit, but you also need to point out that they have become a WWE satellite where you knew there were going to be talent from NXT

or WWE.

I know AJ Styles made a very brief appearance.

Well, yeah, and they had telegraphed that by finding his gear in the locker room or whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I mean.

He can't be far away from his pants.

Look, TNA has more buzz going for it right now than it has at any point

in a very long time.

I actually don't know when the last point they had this much buzz.

A lot of it's based around the WWE relationship.

And again, they've become a WWE satellite office.

In a way, it's good.

if you can get past, you know, some of the booking and stuff, in that it gives some of these guys another place to work on another night.

So they're not just working one night a week for NXT or whatever it is.

But TNA and WWE's relationship is a big part of the story.

And, you know, the rise of TNA, remember, there were people in the company telling you they were going to die because Scott Damore got fired.

That was like seven months ago or something.

You know, Scott DeMore, oh, we'll never trust this place.

This place is going to go under.

They have no idea what they're doing.

Well, they just drew the biggest house in company history.

So something's going on with them in WWE.

And, you know, a lot of it's about, you know, you know how I feel.

Well,

and to be honest, I can, and I wasn't in the room or I wasn't in any of the conversations.

I wasn't even there.

But I can see where Scott Damoore having not only a business, but also a

a personal investment in

wrestling in general and in the company.

If they were bandying around this idea of,

oh, we'll just, you know, we'll be a subsidiary storage closet over here for the WWE and we'll make more money, but it won't be your vision of the product or, you know, et cetera.

I can see where that may have been a sticking point.

Maybe that was it to begin with.

That's why he's, well, I'll just buy it.

If you want to fucking just turn it over, well, no, we want to make a lot of money from these other people with more money.

And I'm not a fan of Scott DeMore's vision.

I think a lot of other people wouldn't be fans of the actual vision.

But, you know, for all the people who say, like, TNA is so great right now and NXT is so great, TNA is basically now just another NXT.

I watched a little bit last night in the background.

That's where I saw Top Dolla, where it was like Team TNA led by the commissioner or whatever he is, Santino Morella, and who's out there in his gimmick voice as the commissioner.

And it was a team who was like Moose

and Eddie Edwards, who

I haven't seen Eddie Edwards in a while, but you know, again, it was just, it was this team.

And then all of a sudden, Trek Williams and Top Dollins, some little guy come out.

And I was like, all right, this is kind of like NXT-ish.

And then there was like a long women's tag match and I gave up.

And I just said, I've seen enough.

It's exactly.

There's a format of wrestling and a type of show

that

is everywhere.

Just like everyone copied WWE for years, they're all copying this.

And the only one who's not is Tony, and he's gone into such a complete other direction that,

you know, again, that can't be enjoyable the way I want to enjoy wrestling.

And it's frustrating to me, but credit for TNA growing their business, getting a lot of exposure with WWE.

Let's see what happens if

they don't sell to WWE and they finally say no about something.

Well, I don't think they're going to sell.

I don't think they're going to say no, but I don't think they're going to sell because as long as it's set up this way,

it benefits TKO, WWE, whatever entity might be benefited from any type of antitrust or monopoly or unfair trade practices or whatever, or just ganging up on people.

Well, we're working with these other,

these, these poor needy children over here in Canada, you know, whatever.

You know, but WWE.

Anyway, well, WWE has a whole system now.

I mean, it's really, when you think about it, it's the two main brands.

It's NXT,

it's AAA,

and it's TNA.

All these different places they could send people as they sign up everyone they can.

It'll be interesting to see what Japanese promotion they'll end up buying.

But they're trying to gobble up all the air right now.

And

we've said it for a while with AEW.

We haven't even reviewed the show yet, but we've said it for a while.

The idea that they're going to run into the angunkel problem where they're not going to be able to get talent.

WW is doing everything they can to make that the actual challenge.

And they don't need,

they're going to own enough, but they don't need to own everything as long as they're the most important thing in that entity's existence and they're making a lot of money with them.

They'll just keep them under their thumb.

Eric Bischoff got some attention this week.

He was on the Ariel Hawani show, and I don't have the quote in front of me, but I think it was something along the lines of: TNA can surpass AEW

if they just get a good TV deal.

That's all it would take.

Do you think it's that simple, or what do you think?

From what I saw from watching the one TNA show,

they would need some content.

They would need some content, but the thing, if they had a TV deal,

then they would be heavily featuring at least NXT talent.

We just talked, you know, the WWE pipeline, which means that the WWE would be in approval of that deal.

And then they would probably be supporting it.

And they could probably figure out a way to out-produce and/or hot shot or whatever.

So, yeah, TNA with a TV deal would be dangerous to AEW if they let WWE

pretty much run it for them.

Well, we'll see see what happens, but something to keep our eyes on, the rise of TNA.

You know, I used to take those trips when I was with TNA, Brian, and

I would go pert near

1,700 miles round trip.

And except for the burden that I would face actually at the shows,

it wasn't that bad a trip a lot of times.

There were trials and tribulations, but sometimes it was just boom cruising down the highway.

But I went out of town this past week, and it was not just cruising down the highway.

I had

a week where I had the most fun

time anywhere I've been in just years and years.

And the trip to and from it was the unluckiest

that I think I've ever been,

or at least in 30 years on the road, just for

the frequency of what the fuck thing's going on.

And I will tell you, folks, now that I'm back and nobody can come and

ambush us, I went with some of my oldest friends, and I mean that in a chronological fashion, we're old, we're very old.

to see the Jack Pfeffer collection at the University of Notre Dame.

And we'll talk about it in a minute.

And

if you've listened to this show very often, then you know who Jack Pfeffer is.

But for the kids, we don't want you to be left out.

So you got a minute or two while I tell this other story.

Google Jack Pfeffer, P-F-E-F-E-R.

But I went to the

to the University of Notre Dame, where that collection is located with the other members, Brian, of what we now call the Flying Toe Hold Club,

which consists of my

oldest and best close personal friend, Bobby Fulton of the Fantastics, and Tom Burke, who I've known for,

good God, I've known him for two years longer than I've known Bobby, so 47 years.

And Tom Burke's friend, Chris McMahon, who I just met, who's much younger than us, but who was just a wonderfully helpful helpful individual.

And because he's a school teacher and he's smart and using all the modern technology, his brother Pat

didn't believe him when he said he was coming with me and Bobby Fulton and Tom Burke to the Pfeffer Collection.

So, Pat, go fuck yourself.

How about that?

What did his Uncle Vince think of it?

I mean, no relation.

Yeah, sure.

He is no, no, he, oh, he's

he's red-haired and

nothing like the dark and evil McMahons.

he's the the light and happy mcmahon he's a happy peppy mcmahon

but anywho

what that's the awkward pause after that comment i was clearing my throat and i was just about to jump back in but i'll jump back in anyway

but anywho he said as he jumped back in

We went up there, but as I said, I was happy while I was there.

We're going to talk about that but

people wonder why i don't go out of town and i don't take trips so the

it's like the old rodney dangerfield line i i got up this morning i opened the door the doorknob fell off i picked up my suitcase the handle fell off i'm afraid to go to the bathroom i'm afraid to leave the house again i'd been planning this trip for weeks and brian you know the weather down here it's been the pop-up torrential downpour thunderstorms in the afternoon because the high heat and humidity, but there hasn't been like widespread rain coverage.

And the forecast a couple of days out was the same thing.

Oh, you're going to get thunderstorms, downpours in the afternoon.

I said, I'll just leave.

It's 280 miles.

It's like a four and a half hour drive.

I said, I'll leave about 11 o'clock in the morning and I'll just be out of that way.

And I even checked the weather up South Bend was going to be cloudy and whatever.

Indianapolis, same thing, maybe pop-up storms in the afternoon.

Well, Sunday morning, I get up and I figure I'll just check the weather for any updates.

So, this is about eight o'clock here in Louisville, right?

I check the weather.

Same thing for Louisville, same thing for South Bend, which is where the University of Notre Dame is located, if I haven't made that specifically abundantly clear.

And in the middle of Indianapolis,

high chance of severe thunderstorms with downpours and torrential rain at fucking noon.

What?

And I look on the national radar, and there's a big blotch of goddamn storm rain coming across the Midwest.

It looks like the spaceship in Independence Day.

And it's going to, because Louisville to South Bend, as I said, 280 miles, it's directly south to directly north, straight up.

This and Indianapolis is right in the middle, middle, and this thing's coming right to cut me off from where I need to go.

I said, fuck, that looks bad.

I'm going to leave now.

So I get in the, I wake Stace up, the weather, I got to go.

And I get all my stuff together and I get in the truck and I leave about nine o'clock, right?

So I'm going to get past this rain.

And

the only thing,

Brian, that you go through between Louisville, Kentucky and South Bend, Indiana

is cornfields

and nothing besides Indianapolis.

That's the one big city.

You got to go around the 465 loop.

There's all kinds of traffic and construction on it.

The ramps go all kinds of different ways.

It's 30 miles, it's a shitty little loop, and otherwise you're driving through the fucking cornfield.

I get almost to the Indianapolis loop, and it starts getting a little drizzly.

And it's a little bit more drizzly.

And then I'm almost ready to get on the loop, and that's when a kind of steady rain starts, but it's still, it's not too bad.

And it's Sunday morning, so the traffic ain't horrible.

But the farther I go around this loop,

the goddamn darker the skies get.

And then I start to see the lightning coming.

And then there comes the goddamn downpour.

And it's almost pitch black and people are slowing down.

And you can't hardly see with the orange barrels in the construction.

And I'm just a few miles from where I get off this thing and get back on the highway that will take me all the way to South Bend.

And I can't get off this loop and you don't know what the fuck's going on, right?

So I figured if I just get to this exit, then when I get off, the first thing I'll do, I'll take the first place I can pull over.

And then the deluge and the people have their flashers flashers on.

And I take this exit, and immediately you can get off to the right.

And I take this ramp, I can barely see anything.

The fucking rain is blinding.

I get down to the bottom of the ramp.

I have to go to the right in some fashion.

I do that.

And over on the side, there's a big,

I don't know, it was a business complex of some kind, but it was closed.

It's a Sunday morning, and there's a big empty parking lot.

I pull in the middle of that parking lot, and I'm sitting there, and the rain is just hammering down, right?

And I call Stacey and I tell her that I've pulled over.

I'm going to wait this rain out.

Okay.

And then as I'm sitting there, Brian, I realize I've been in the car for over two hours now.

And this, I'm watching it pour rain like I'm standing in a shower.

And I'm in the middle of an empty parking lot with no, there's, this is like a, there's condominiums and there's office buildings, like a nine to five type of deal.

There is no place in any visible direction that I could go to a gas station or anything like that.

I got a piss.

And that water is just coming down.

And I'm going to,

I'm looking around in the car

and I've got

nothing that could be a contact.

I can't piss in a metal fucking soft drink can.

I might, the tab might cut my wee wee off or whatever, right?

So I'm thinking, if I just open the door a crack and turn to the side while I'm in the driver's seat and pull the leg of my shorts in the proper direction,

then I can do it without getting wet.

I can do it outside of the car, right?

Now, are you following me on this?

I mean, I'm following your story.

I don't know about what you're doing, but yes.

Well, you can see that it would be feasible.

Technically, yes.

Well, but it was for quite a while until I forgot that right as

the evacuation ends of your bladder or whatever the fuck it is,

your pressure on your stream,

it goes down.

It doesn't just snap off like a spigot.

So as my pressure went down, oh shit, I just pissed all over my pants.

Oh, my God.

And now I'm mad because now I'm wet, but it's not the rain.

I've pissed myself.

Now, bear in mind, I've already been freezing.

Because remember, I said a couple of weeks ago, I took Black Beauty in, spent all the money, got her serviced and everything.

And I got the AC charged up that hadn't cooled in ages.

So now it was,

that's the thing.

I wore shorts and a t-shirt thinking it's going to be hot weather, but it's fucking overcast and rainy, and the air conditioning is now cold and stuck on high.

So I've I've been shivering to death.

Now I've got wet pants.

So then,

finally, it stops raining.

You had a change of pants with you, just for your, you had more than one pair of pants for your trip, correct?

Well, but I ain't going to get out in the middle of the rain to get in the back of the goddamn truck to get the fucking clean pants.

You see?

Yeah.

And then where am I going to change my pants in the goddamn parking lot?

In the truck.

You could do it in the truck.

well i chose when the rain let up into a light sprinkle to just get the out of there

with a burger towel on my lap

so then bear in mind i have gotten off the highway and turned right and immediately turned into a goddamn parking lot right

But I got to go to the right and the GPS says go to the right anyway that I got in my truck.

And I turn right and it takes me 20 minutes to get back on the highway I'm only 400 yards away from because there's some kind of goddamn traffic circle and lead in the wrong.

I don't know where the fuck.

I finally found the highway.

And I get back on, and it's overcast all the way, but at least it doesn't rain.

And I get to South Bend.

Brian, have you ever been to South Bend, Indiana?

No, I haven't.

If we have listeners there, I don't mean to appear insensitive to your issues, but you live in a fucking shithole.

Oh, wow.

Now, the University of Notre Dame is a gorgeous place on the campus.

I mean, it's beautiful and the trees and the birds and the

knowledge and the libraries and the, I understand they play football there every once in a while.

But I came highway 31.

up through India from Indianapolis through another 100 miles of cornfield.

When I got into town, I'm thinking there's a college there, right?

Brian, you mentioned when you knew I was going, well,

maybe there's going to be some of those cool places, local restaurants or good food places or college towns.

Maybe it's, yeah, the kind of you see the vintage clothing or the unique

vinyl store or comic shop, whatever, the cool college stuff, right?

If you go to South Bend, if you need to pawn something,

then I know a variety variety of places you could go.

I go into town, and there's not even the,

I mean, Perkins, I believe, was the highest casual dining place, highest level casual dining place I saw all the way through.

I had to go through, all the way through the middle of town from south to north.

And at first it was just like, eh, the pawn shop area.

Then it became an area where most businesses appeared to be closed.

And I stopped at a light and there were many people on the corner and they didn't appear to be going anywhere.

They were just kind of there.

And this woman walks from the other side of the street across two lanes to give me the roll down the window sign.

And I'm like, ah, green light, green light.

And then you go through the middle of downtown, which is Dedder and Kelsey's nuts on Sunday morning.

And then you get to the north side of it and you're at the college and that's a nice area and that's where my hotel was.

But

it was a little

disheartening that my

impression of South Bend was I didn't want to get fucking carjacked.

So I'm thinking we're probably not going to go too far to eat dinner, right?

Whenever we go out,

so

I get to the hotel, get checked in,

everything's fine.

I'm going to meet Bobby Fulton for dinner.

And Stacey calls me and says, well, I'm following the ambulance.

We're taking mom to the hospital.

I've got to what?

She hasn't been in the hospital since last July.

It's her anniversary of going to, but I literally have not left town

for years.

And

I'm like, what?

I just got here.

I said,

is everything okay?

Well, we're following it.

I'll call you back.

So I'm standing by.

And by the time she got to the hospital, she did feel better, but she had gotten dizzy and and or disoriented kind of thing.

And her blood pressure had dropped.

And they wanted to monitor her heart rate, which was

fluctuating.

So

Stacey's like, no, you don't have to come back home, but, you know, she's feeling better.

We're keeping that.

And they kept her for a couple of days,

you know, to monitor all these various things, see if they can figure out what the fuck.

And she's got a follow-up coming up, but they let her out.

But there, Stacey was worried.

And again,

not only have I not been away from home overnight

in years,

but it's been 11 years since Stacey spent the night in this house alone without either me or Harley Quinn or both.

So now, and now her mom's in the hospital, so she's freaking out over there or over here.

I'm up there,

But everybody gets into town.

I mentioned Bobby Fulton.

I mentioned Tom Burke.

I mentioned Chris McMahon.

And I'm going to meet them all.

They're staying.

Tom and Chris are over at the hotel next door to us, same parking lot.

Just I use points.

And so I said, I've got the truck.

It's just been serviced.

I'll take us over to the library.

Monday morning, we'll get there bright and early.

Now, watch out, boys, because I just had this air charged up.

It's going to freeze your balls off.

Brian, we got in the truck.

I started it.

The air conditioning is goddamn stone cold dead.

No, how's that possible?

The air conditioning that has been stuck on high for the past three or four years that I just had charged up so it was cold and high is now stone cold.

Will not blow.

Not a puff.

Oh my God.

Not a puff.

What was the the temperature?

Well, it wasn't bad in South Bend to go two miles, but I was going to have to come back to Louisville eventually where the heat index is going to be north of 100.

So I'm already in.

So then

we go on.

Tom said, I know how to get there.

I'm doing this from memory now.

Well, we ended up parking in a lot.

And we said,

because we said, where where we ended up pulled up and asked so where do we park for the library oh you can park right in that lot let us give you a pass oh well thank you kind lady right

and we parked in that lot and they had said just walk that way and we did walk that way 0.9

miles

there tom burke's 80 years old he makes us look young right

And we've all had our various, except for McMahon.

He's a kid.

He deserved it.

He should have crawled.

It was a mile from the parking lot.

It was a mile from the parking lot to the library.

Oh, my God.

But it's a beautiful campus.

So then I'll talk about our time there later on, but I'm just in the instance of we're in the middle of the story of going back and forth.

We have our day there.

We come back to the hotel.

We decide to meet to go to dinner later on.

And as I'm closing up the goddamn truck, the key fob, the thing that with the automatic locker and unlocker and panic button and pop the back and everything, the key fob I've had for 18 years now breaks off my keychain and falls on the ground.

Oh my God.

I mean, what the fuck?

Okay, so they're going to ask

where the best place

within the near radius, right?

We don't want to go back down south in that neighborhood.

None of us are in the mood to fight for our dinner.

They ask at the desk of the hotel, hotel,

where's the best place we can go eat within a few mile radius of here?

You know where they sent us?

Two miles down the road to the restaurant at the embassy suites.

But they sent you to another hotel?

They sent us to another hotel as an example of the best place to eat around the area.

And it wasn't even the goddamn,

where they asked wasn't, it wasn't like they're sending us to another Hilton chain.

They just said, no, this is the best place to eat around here.

Because like I said, Perkins was on the other side of the gap.

There was a Culver's.

But anyway, so we go down to the fucking embassy suites and we have,

again, dinner.

But

I ordered the cheeseburger that's on the, with all the loaded with the cheese and the onion and the fucking bacon and the whole nine yards.

And everybody's food comes and everybody's perfect.

And I looked at it mine

and they've given me a hockey puck that was burnt to a goddamn charbo, broiled crisp with nothing on it.

No bacon, no onions, no dressing of any kind, just a lone dead slice of cheese.

So again, I asked the lady, I said, oh, I'll take care of it.

She gave it to me and comped it, but it's the idea that, again, I'm the only one that,

what is it about me?

Everything I touch is turning to disaster.

So more on this later.

The next day, we took the shuttle because they found out that the hotel shuttle would have taken us to the goddamn library and dropped us off at the front door.

So, we did that the second day, and it came and picked us up and brought us back.

And

as I was going over everything, I had noticed

on Sunday morning, actually, before I left,

my back, my gum on my back tooth was a little touchy.

And I thought that maybe I'd stuck it with a tortilla chip or something the day before, whatever, that kind of thing, right?

No big deal.

And I'd, you know, for the past few days, I've been occupied, but I didn't have any real discomfort.

But I noticed on Tuesday night, I said, this is getting a little touchier.

And I look in there, and there's the gum next to my back tooth

is swollen up like the size of a large kernel of corn.

I'm like, what the fuck is going on here?

Now

alien is popping out inside my mouth.

so wednesday morning i get up early and i have to call stace on the way to say hey can you get me a dentist appointment so they can see what the is going on here but i've decided on wednesday i'll leave at 6 30 in the morning because that way i can beat the heat right it gets daylight i'm an old man i'm up anyway

so I get in the car at 6.30 in the morning.

I check out of the hotel.

Before I even get on the highway, I pull right over

and I fucking

going to fill up with gas.

And I get out and I open my wallet and I look and goddamn, I've left my credit card Monday night at the restaurant for that dinner.

I didn't get it out when I signed the check.

We were talking.

I got distracted.

I left it in the folio.

And I've been, motherfucker, this is the first credit card I've ever lost in my life in 45 years of having credit cards.

And so I have another card.

I don't mean to say that I was destitute then, but here's another thing that I've never done before.

So then I get the gas, I get in the car, I'm driving.

Now I find out the air will blow if I'm driving 60 miles an hour down the road.

But if you stop,

you're fucked.

So at least I wasn't completely miserable.

But I got home

and Stace had had called the dentist and got me an appointment.

And just to finish this story up,

I went to the dentist on Thursday, as I mentioned earlier in the program.

When we were hearing the news, I had a numb face.

This tooth that has not hurt me in any way,

that has not been sensitive to any kind of heat or cold,

got infected because

there's a crown on it from many years ago.

But apparently this insidious, whatever the fuck, bacteria got underneath in a cavity area that's underneath the gum line.

And she's, oh, you'd never be able to clean that by yourself at home.

That tooth has to come out.

What?

It's just the gum.

The tooth has never hurt.

The gum's been puffy for four days.

No, it's loose.

It's rotten underneath.

We got to pull that son of a bitch in the near future.

Right now, here's antibiotics and we're going to

irrigate your goddamn infection.

So, when I talk about the bad tooth I've, you know, I've had with the post and everything, I can understand, but no, that's just been sitting back there minding its own business, never bothered me a goddamn day.

Oh, no,

it needs to go,

I'm never gonna leave town again.

Oh, shit, that was notes I was about to fucking read.

I don't know what you're ripping over there.

Yeah, I was ripping the fucking.

That's my inflate.

Hold on, let me smooth this out.

So, the first time you go on a trip in years and six years

for Bobby Eaton's funeral.

You piss your pants, you get caught in a storm, there's no food that's any good anywhere near your hotel.

I ate hotel food four days in a row.

You walk longer than you've walked, maybe in years.

You walked a mile.

Two miles.

I'm losing a tooth.

My truck is now

because now for the next week, it's going to be 105 degrees in Louisville.

I can't just drive around town, which is all I ever drive.

I can only get air when I'm going 60.

So I'm going back over to see my man Tyler.

But

I have to do the dentist thing for well, I'm on the antibiotics right now, too, so that the blood poisoning doesn't go to my brain.

But does the key fob falling apart and,

you know, all of a sudden you need it and the air conditioning is gone?

Does this change your thoughts about possibly getting a new car?

No.

New truck.

No, I'm going to, goddamn, I'm going to do something.

I don't know what to do about the fob.

The fob may be fucked, but I'm going to fix that air conditioning.

It's just a measly air conditioning system in an otherwise

passable vehicle.

Can't you just like fix up the LaSalle and drive around in that

it's getting to the point where it might be easier to to restore the la salle than to restore the expedition yeah you don't need a key fob for that

but anyhow but

let's go back to uh

the reason for my trip and the fun that i did have

and hopefully everybody's looked up jack pfeffer by now but

for the purposes of this discussion

a lot of the modern research, the books, Brian Solomon's books, Tim Hornbaker's books,

research has been done

at this Jack Pfeffer collection of papers at Notre Dame because

it's the single largest by,

I would imagine, multiple times, I don't know how many multiple times, largest collection archive of wrestling documents inside wrestling business information from the late 20s to the mid-60s that exists anywhere in the world and ever probably has been assembled.

It encompasses every piece of paper, every document, every

telegram, every letter with the envelopes.

Every business record for the most part that I can determine.

I mean, you can only see a small portion of it in

a month if you're an individual person, but every scrap of paper, record, clipping, photo, press release, poster that came into Jack Pfeffer's hands

in the 40 years that he was in the wrestling business.

And

I say that, but there's apparently from what they say, there is a gap,

unfortunately, during the 1930 to 1933 years, the biggest years of business in wrestling, that they think may have

gone into another set of hands because the way that Pfeffer was able to retain all this shit and the odd duck that he was, the motivations for it, etc.

He had not only was he one of the old-time wrestling promoters that kept a hotel suite or room or whatever.

in like one of the hotels in New York City, the Piccadilly Hotel.

Yeah.

Yes.

And I mean, this was the days where the hotels weren't the Hampton or the Red Roof Inn or the Super 8 or whatever.

It was the Ambassador Hotel in Houston or the,

you know, International Hotel in Pittsburgh or whatever.

The Algonquins booked.

I'll take the Piccadilly.

Yeah, you know, that's the thing is these were inner city, you know, downtown, old-fashioned hotels like you see in the movies.

So he kept that, but also he had storage places apparently around Manhattan for years.

And he worked out of, he never had a home.

He worked out of hotels.

There were hotels in Houston, hotels in Nashville, hotels in California.

And people would be

sending him telegrams to these locations.

But nevertheless, so all of this material that he had saved ended up when he was,

you know, elderly.

And

the last years of his life, he lived with the wrestling promoter that ran Boston in the early 60s, Tony Santos, who he had been close with, who was one of the last major market promoters that really relied exclusively on him for talent.

And he lived with him and then moved into a nursing home.

Tony Santos ended up with

this entire five tons, apparently,

of all of this material.

And

I mean,

it was 50 years ago.

Tony Santos was not a young man.

There was no call for,

you know, preserving wrestling history amongst the business at that point and not a lot of the fans.

But Eddie Einhorn,

who was the guy who ran the iwa we've talked about that before the chicago white sox owner

he was a big fan and he did kind of like what billy corgan did with the chicago bob loose you know record wrestling records or

you know what some of the other

what triple h has done with some of the title belts

He bought

all of this stuff from Tony Santos.

Brian, did I mention to you the amount or did you already know it?

You told me the amount.

I didn't know the amount before.

$1,500.

I was 14 years old.

I would have got $1,500 together to pay for it back then.

But that's like, what, $300 a ton?

And

I guess Einhorn then realized, well, what the fuck?

You know, this is five tons of stuff.

And apparently it was in boxes

with no.

The people at Notre Dame try to

respect the integrity.

When a collection is donated to them,

they try to respect the sorting process, the integrity of what the creator, the owner, the person, but there was none here.

This was a, we're going to be talking about Jack Pfeffer off of this visit alone and

other people that he came in contact with for a number of weeks, probably on the program, because there's

such an incredible wealth of history there that nobody was ever able to know publicly before.

But, nevertheless, Einhorn donates it to the University of Notre Dame.

The Hessberg Library there

has the

I don't want to overstate them or misrepresent, but it's either the largest collection in the United States or the largest collection in the world of sports papers and sports archives from personalities in that field of all kinds, not just wrestling.

And this is the,

oh, goddamn, the rare books and special collections department is who oversees all this type of thing.

But he donated it to them in like 1977.

And it all sat there

pretty much untouched for over 20 years.

And Brian, I know you and me, we're both wrestling nerds, but nobody that I, as I remember, nobody had any idea that it existed during that time period.

Is that the way you remember it?

Did you ever hear anything about it?

You know, I don't recall the first time I heard about it, but I remember my mind being blown.

It must have been

sometime within 20 years ago, let's say, i when i heard that there was a collection of all this stuff at notre dame it almost didn't sound real yeah no one else is talking about this how come this isn't out there and you know it's extraordinary and am i going to ask you just one question before you come jump back to it you said there's a gap approximately 30 to 32 33 whatever it was Does that mean you have documents before then?

Because that's what he's working with Jack Curley.

Because that's Jack Curley and him and Rudy Miller in New York, right before he goes against the office and really changes a lot of things in the way the media covers wrestling.

But that's my question.

Was there stuff before that point?

Yes.

And I mean, here's the thing.

You can ask me.

I can tell you what I saw.

I can't tell you what is there because

between Tom, Bobby, Chris, and I,

we probably went through

if we went through two or three

complete boxes each,

that in the two days,

that'd be eight boxes, right?

There are over 250

special archival file boxes

separated into categories of correspondence, clippings and programs, photos,

every

business papers, financial documents, tax returns.

I saw just in the two or three boxes,

you know, and what other people were showing me that they were looking at stuff from the 19 mid to late 20s through 1967.

So, I mean, there's there is a finding aid, which we will get into later on, that they've set up because this is part of the story is

nobody knew it was there.

Nobody knew this fucking thing, the whole thing existed.

But the previous curator of the department, the head of the, you special collections department there, George Rugg,

in the late 90s started trying to put some order to it and

started doing their

cataloging system that they do with

the other collections.

And

they created over the years what they called a finding aid, where it's on.

online now that you can look up names or they're broken down into different categories but it's it took him he started in the late 90s and he just retired

i think like very recently like in the last year or two i believe and over the past several years he had really pressed the pedal to it to try to get it finished before he retired it took almost 30 years for people and Bless them, they were, they're very smart people and they're archivists and they're librarians

but they had no idea of the wrestling business from 100 years ago when they went into it, right?

And the current curator is a fellow named Greg Bond, and he was the one who hosted us and great guy.

And he said, you know, the same thing.

He said, this is all, you know, fascinating when we hear so much about it, but we didn't have a wrestling background going into this.

So it was difficult for us.

And we learn something every time that somebody comes in that, you know, is researching this.

But that's the thing is, it's still,

there's still some things that haven't been scanned.

And,

you know, the oversized posters and giant photographs.

He's got lithographs from 80 years ago or whatever of wrestlers.

But it's an, and you can't.

Here's the, I guess we should say it right now.

Before we go any further, we got a big audience,

and I'm telling you how great it is.

And now I'm going to say, don't fucking go.

Don't try.

This is not a roadside tourist attraction.

It's not a fan fest.

It's not a flea market.

This is the goddamn University of Notre Dame.

And that's why it sounded so bizarre

that they would have a massive collection of pro wrestling stuff from Jack Pfeffer, right?

Because this, but I've told you the story of how it got here, but

you can't just

show up, knock on these people's door and

say, show me some cool wrestling shit.

They'll probably call the goddamn campus police on you.

And I saw a few of those too.

Tom Burke has been there before.

I mean, he's recognized name in research and wrestling, and he knew the previous curator.

And that's how he was able to register us.

But this is a deal where you have to tell them that you're coming and what you're wanting to research because there were other people

doing research for books in other fields in the next room while we were sitting there.

So this is a thing that goes on.

They got to know you're coming.

You got to tell them what you're looking for and pick it up from their finding aid ahead of time so they can pull it for you.

if possible, because you can't go in the room where it's actually all stored.

They bring you a box at a time at your request.

You have to register and show your ID.

You have to check your bag in a fucking locker and only keep either, you know, your telephone or your goddamn pad or laptop or whatever, no ink pens.

You have to wash your hands before you open a box and handle anything.

They give you foam mats to put the stuff out on.

There's cameras everywhere.

They keep an eye on your ass, and you're only allowed to take one file out of one box at a time

with a marker to put the place in so it goes right back in the same place.

So this is not like.

That's the way it should be.

Well, I'm just saying.

And again, you know,

you're not only on candid camera, but you've given them a copy of your ID

when you've come in.

And

I mean, this is not a, like I'm saying, I don't mean to,

I don't want this to be ruined by anybody going, hey, show me the goddamn shit of the fucking angel.

But this is a serious deal.

And

the problem is that I see

is that even Tom Burke, Bobby, and I, the three of us combined age 200 years.

And out of that, 170 years have been following wrestling combined, right?

We were still trying to figure out from what we were looking at, well, who was he talking about there?

Because they all used nicknames.

Or was this the time period where so-and-so?

I'm afraid in 10 years or so, there's still going to be smart people like Brian Solomon and, as I said, Hornbaker and all these people doing research.

But

the people that have been in the business that kind of were really familiar or could figure out and piece together the wording and the phrasing and the nicknames and who was talking about what

may be gone.

So I'm really anxious.

I'm already sold myself on going again.

Not anytime soon, though.

But

it's the most amazing thing I've ever seen that he was able to not only collect this stuff and retain it all those years, but that it end up

through fair means and foul.

And after, you know, 30 years of,

you know obscurity it's actually in a place now where they're they're preserving it for the future generations that are able to crack the code and figure out what everything means and said the because the thing it's all paperwork two fefford it's obviously not his letters for the most part i saw his tax returns and there's things in his handwriting that you know

He would

the guy was so compulsive, Brian, that you would say, imagine just a blank standard-sized piece of white paper, right?

There would be figures

down a column, 20 figures, and then the next column, 20 figures, the next column, 20 figures, next column, 20 figures, $1.20, 75 cents, 60 cents, $1.40.

He recorded the cost of his telephone calls and his telegrams.

But there's these just pages and pages of these worksheets.

And he kept all that shit.

But every letter that any promoter ever wrote to him and every clipping and press release that any of his wrestlers sent in after he got him booked in a place, here's how they're using me, here's how I'm doing.

And every telegram that was, it's just, it's incredible.

I have droned on.

Do you have any questions before we move on?

I got a couple of things I'll hit you with.

No, and obviously this will be an ongoing series of segments for a long time here on the show.

So for those of you who love wrestling history, the drive-thru and the experience in the midst of all the contemporary stuff we talk about is going to be loaded to the tits with classic wrestlers.

One question before you get to this, and obviously you know what I'm into.

I'm fascinated by all this.

You know, I have a pretty large collection and even some original Pfeffer stuff, but I can only imagine how much.

I mean, fun's the only word I could think of, just the idea of sitting sitting there and going through it.

The only question I have for you right now is:

what does it make you think about your collection?

Does it change what you think a possible future could be?

I don't know.

That's the only thing I'll throw at you.

Now, how do you mean that now?

Tell me that again.

Like, would Notre Dame have the Jim Cornet collection next to the Jim Collection?

Oh, a different collection.

I don't think it would be for the rare books and special collections division because,

I mean, I have some files of insider paperwork from the modern era, but

my collection of wrestling memorabilia is still mostly stuff that was sold publicly or that's, you know, was distributed to the public or whatever.

This is,

there's plenty of that here, too.

I mean, rare programs of people I didn't even know ran cities in the United States at this point in time.

There's programs from that I've never seen before, but this is all insider paperwork and business at the highest level, involving every major promoter and wrestler in the business at some time or another.

And the size and scope of it, your files, my files.

Everybody Tootsie's files, whoever the fuck.

No, shove them up your ass.

It's just not only of the bulk, but of the

uniqueness, the rarity, and the honesty.

Because

he's got these other promoters that are his friends.

Willie Gilsenberg, in the same letter, he's talking about how the business is going, and he's knocking other promoters.

Oh, my wife, whatever her name was, Mabel says hello, sends her regards.

I saw the letter where Stu Hart.

informed Jack Pfeffer that he wanted Pfeffer, he and Helen wanted Pfeffer to be Ross's godfather.

I wonder if Ross has that because Ross is a historian of the, he's the historian of the family.

Well, he don't have the letter that Stu wrote to Jack about it.

I wonder if he's aware of it, I guess, is the thing.

Wow, that's something.

I'm sure they told him, but.

But, you know, that is so when they're sharing their personal opinions of what the other promoters are doing.

And for as many people as hated Pfeffer,

there were also people that were loyal to him almost to the Willie Gilsenberg was writing him in the early 60s.

And Gilsenberg, for those of you 70s WWWF fans, he's the president of the WWWF, but he was Vince Sr.'s partner for years.

He went back with boxing and wrestling to the 30s.

He knew everybody.

And I think it was a Gilsenberg letter where I want to say it was his, where he was talking about Joe Malkowitz in San Francisco saying, I guess poor old Joe will never get his territory sorted out.

And it was the next year Ray Shire came in and put him, or Roy Shire came in and put him out of business.

Yeah, I think we did it on guess the program.

I have here from Newark the 30th anniversary program for Willie Gilsenberg and Babe Coleman,

two boxing and wrestling promoters.

So that's 62.

So that puts it at 32 when Willie Gilsenberg would have started.

Yeah.

So, but nevertheless,

this is one of a kind.

None of the other promoters that

even wrote each other, and that's all they did was write each other letters and telegrams at that point in time, except for phone calls were the really

important shit.

But nobody else kept anything like this besides Pfeff.

I guess that's the other remarkable thing, the idea that, according to what you said before,

In the 70s, in the early 70s, maybe, but definitely the 60s, maybe the 50s, that he would have had storage units all around Manhattan for something this size.

That's

kind of crazy, too.

I guess I don't really think storage units.

And

we say storage units,

because I asked Tom Burke about this.

And as I mentioned, Tom's older than me, and he's researching for a friend of his that's writing a book on Pfeffer.

We say storage units as we use the terminology now, but he had some way of storing things around Manhattan.

Let's put it that way.

That's how it is because I mean, obviously, it's true because here this shit is.

But here's the thing: he, because he never had a home and lived in hotels and was always on the road doing it, you know, trying to book either

when he was a promoter, an actual partner in the office, or then when he had pieces of talent, was trying to book them to promoters.

He would write off $6

a day for meals 365 days a year off his income tax.

Because he considered himself, he was always traveling for business.

Every hotel,

every telegram, every telephone call, these were his expenses.

His entire life was a business expense.

Yeah, and I know at some point, maybe 25 years ago, 20 years ago, some Pfeffer stuff ended up on eBay.

I believe it was sold by a nephew or someone who was in the family.

No,

I think, and there's another, there was a separate collection also that

some was, somebody in the Santos family had it.

Oh, interesting.

I believe, and I'm willing to be corrected, but somebody in the Santos family had had it possibly, and

that's what was sold.

And there could be something else.

out there.

There's no guarantee that Notre Dame, well, it's guaranteed Notre Dame's not all of it.

There's some stuff missing.

It can't can't be a lot.

Wow.

But there's other stuff out there.

But this is,

and you know, again, we've gone long today and with what's happened.

And I took a lot of pictures.

Hotchkiss is going to be taking the chip from my camera and transferring this over because I took pictures of documents because I took pages and pages of notes, but I couldn't write that much that fast.

And

so I felt like a spy in World War II.

Oh, let me shoot this paper, but I want to just give you some random factoids, can I?

And then we're going to do some longer form stuff because I have the Fargo's letters gave me such financial records and such insight into not only their relationship, but the way Pfeffer handled all of his talent at that time.

that we can I'm going to be able to go back and look at some old cards in the various Tennessee towns, see what guys were making, see when business was up and down,

extrapolate some of these things.

But let me let me hit you with one thing here, Brian, last.

Do you know how much

Nature Boy Buddy Rogers earned as NWA World Champion in February 1962?

February 62, I do not know.

Now, see, there weren't any stadium shows.

It was wintertime, right?

Remember, they'd done him and O'Connor in Comiskey Park the previous year.

This is just a random month in 1962.

And of course, this was when Vince Sr.

and the New York bunch was monopolizing him, but still.

But Chicago, New York, Fred Kohler and Vince McMahon and Tutz Mont had

a wannabe gold dust trio thing happening, and Benny Rogers was the centerpiece.

And he was in Chicago and New York.

February 1962, $17,000.

Do you know what $17,000 equals in today's money 63 years later?

No.

$181,574.07.

Wow.

That is the standard of living

that he was accustomed to at that point in time in comparison to what everybody else was doing.

And

I wonder what other athletes were doing.

Yeah.

I mean,

oh, yeah, well, that's why, that's why Ernie Ladd quit football and why McDaniel quit football and et cetera.

But this was another level than that.

And

the reason why I know this is because Gilsenberg, who again was partners with the guy that was paying Rogers,

said, buddy,

gross, because you know, Pfeffer had given, and now we know more than ever, Pfeffer gave Rogers the gimmick.

Pfeffer was deducting capes, costumes, and sequins off his income tax, too.

And then they had a major falling out.

And some of us, you and I, both have those

giant papers that Pfeffer put out saying that Buddy Rogers was a fake.

Yes, but that falling out had occurred in the early 50s.

And then that's why Pfeffer saw.

a tag team version of Buddy Rogers in the Fargo's.

More on that in the future.

But Gilsenberg

had given, you know, Buddy the uh or given Pfeffer the info.

Yeah, Buddy grossed $17,000 in February.

I guess he did.

And another letter

said,

Well, Buddy settled the lawsuit with Miller and Gotch.

Now the boys can go their separate ways.

Buddy's such a great worker, it's too bad he can't get along with the real wrestlers.

That's interesting.

Yeah,

Sean Michaels.

And that, but then you back up 10 years.

In 1950,

Pfeffer had these,

and these records are, again, his handwriting on these blank pieces of hotel stationery.

He wrote on the back sides of them.

But he had probably 20 or 30 wrestlers that he was booking out to promoters all over the place, Buddy Rogers and his handpicked.

opponent Billy Darnell, probably the most popular.

And he gave Christmas bonuses to all the wrestlers he was booking out.

And so he had them, he wrote

handwritten receipts received from, you know,

Jack Pfeffer from Buddy Rogers or whatever the fuck for Christmas bonus.

He gave Rogers a Christmas bonus of $1,500.

That's almost $20,000.

Wow.

But

guess how much money that Jack Pfeffer declared

in income on his 1949

income taxes?

Before deductions or after deductions?

Well, either way, I got both.

I don't know.

I actually am very curious about this.

Okay, well, I can tell you that his expenses were $26,000 because we talked about the train and the telegrams and the telephone and the capes, costumes, and sequins, and meals on the road, and all these legitimate expenses in his business, yet his life

was that.

There was never a day off or a non-business expense, right?

So he took $26,000 off for expenses and declared $35,000.

He had grossed $61,000, $7,000 from Cliff Maupin, the Toledo promoter, apparently for supplying him with all of his talent because they were close,

and $54,825 in booking fees from talent,

where he would get them booked and they would send him a portion of their money.

How much is that?

And Rogers,

hold on, Rogers led the list with $10,882 that he sent Pfeffer.

Now, think about this.

Was he given Pfeffer 10%?

That means he grossed $100,000 in 1950.

20% would have been a little heavy for Rogers' stature.

There would have been a blow up before that, but even then, that would have been $50,000.

The point is,

Pfeffer grossed

in 1949

the equivalent of $813,000 in today's money by booking these guys out to all these promoters that either liked him or that he had sway over because of dirt on them or could badger them or blackmail them.

And then the talent turned around and got these great spots.

That's he made Rogers a ton of money.

He had the Fargo's in Madison Square Garden at the same time they were working the Tennessee Territory.

He could work magic for the people.

that he liked and that he believed in and that he wanted to push.

Where did his money go?

Where did Pfeffer was making that kind of money?

That's just one year in 1950.

That's another thing.

Nobody knows.

In this collection, there is almost no,

he has a personal life and personal interactions with the wrestlers and the promoters.

And he has a personal life in terms of there's business paperwork, like there's income tax, personal papers like that.

But there is no family.

There is no woman.

There's no man.

There's no personal communication from anyone to him or whatever.

So this was literally his life.

And where

all that money went, I don't know that anybody's asked yet, but it's a question that as soon as I saw, because I'm fascinated with how much money there used to be in a wrestling business.

And when I saw that, I'm like, where did the fuck did it go?

Yeah.

Of course, now in the 60s.

And see, the thing is, when we get to the Fargo's part, which will come at a future time when I've been able to transcribe a lot of this,

do you remember the famous note where he had written down

August 9, 1967,

locker room, Nashville, Tennessee, meeting with Fargo Gulis Welch and Christine Jarrett?

This is where Christine Jarrett threatened to have me killed.

That was the breakup finally with Jackie Fargo, where Fargo wasn't going to send him any more money.

After all that time.

Oh, I never realized that's what it was over.

That's interesting.

Wow.

But at this, because after that, all the programs from Nashville or from the Tennessee Territory, the arena programs that he's got in the file.

It's written in his handwriting after XX, after Double Cross.

And rats, rats, rats is written at the top of the program.

And the Black Cat.

The black cat.

I've got a few of those.

Yeah.

You know where he got the black cat from?

Was it some magazine?

A perfume ad in a magazine.

And did he just have copies, non-stop copies?

He must.

No, all the ones I saw were originals.

He must have bought like a hundred copies of this fucking magazine or it ran every month for years or whatever.

But anyway, that's the thing.

Again,

you know, Pfeffer was making on this in this this bizarre life that he led, where he would take, usually he never flew, he would take trains from one territory to the other, and then he would ride around for periods of time with the wrestlers that he was booking and then go to the next place.

And

every morning when the Fargoes would go pick him up, when they were on the road with him.

Bobby Fulton, because Bobby Fulton got close to Jackie Fargo, they lived together in North Carolina, not together, but near each other in North Carolina.

Pfeffer would have letters spread out all over the hotel room floor.

Look at what I've done.

I've written all the letters all night.

He stayed in contact with everybody and was pushing his talent.

But, you know, almost a million dollars for this little

odd man to do this fucking weird nomadish existence for all those years and be responsible not only for some of the biggest attractions and biggest money-making

gimmicks in the business.

And then

toward the end of his life with all of the rip-off gimmicks and the

bullshit fake talent, it killed some of the major markets.

But he was always influential, always important in some respect.

Yeah, and in terms of documentation, a lot of the issues that broke out in wrestling 40s, 50s, 60s, he was in the middle of it.

Even if he didn't start it, he got pulled into it because he had talent.

So this is

really promising for the future of this show to hear more about this.

This is great stuff.

Some of these guys swore by him also.

And

anyway, and we're going to get into a lot of New York history, too, that you're going to have to help me with on this New York geography, because it looks like to me they were running a show every night of the week in New York City somewhere.

That may be so.

You know, I was going to ask you, I remember seeing documents

and maybe from Hornbaker.

I may have them somewhere actually now that I think about it, but it was NWA members like chewing out Sam Mushnick over the idea he would even talk to Pfeffer, let alone consider allowing him near the, was it Eddie Quinn?

I forget who it was now.

It's driving me crazy, but one of the promoters like sent Muschnick a letter lambasting him for having anything to do with Jack Pfeffer.

Yes.

And meanwhile, Muschnick was cordial to Pfeffer because Muchnik was a path of least resistance guy.

And why stir this nut up?

And, you know, he has

come talk to the newspapers.

Exactly.

Why piss this guy off?

He's going to come talk to the newspapers, say my wrestlers are fake, and then bring in the most extraordinary gimmicks I've ever seen in this town.

He'll kill the town.

Yeah.

Well, and that was what he said to Christine Jarrett and Nick and Roy and Fargo in the, and they were in the girls' locker room also.

He made note of that in the girls' locker room in Nashville because he was christine had always told me he was trying to get his girls booked

well he already had the girls booked but i think that's when he and fargo had the blow up

and we'll cover it more later but but that was the thing is that was kind of his last

lifeline yeah that was after ahio that was after tony santa is pretty much done yeah and i couldn't but when i opened up the file and i saw that because i've seen photocopies that other researchers have made, but when I saw that in person, I'm like, oh, it's the greatest thing I've ever seen.

Um, and one more thing, and then we'll move on.

I had a piece of paper here somewhere.

Oh,

it took me a while, but I figured out that every time that Willie Gilsenberg would write Jack Pfeffer, he wouldn't call Jim Barnett by his name, he calls him the wizard.

Barnett was the wizard.

I find that so interesting just because you know, Willie Gilsenberg obviously based based that in Newark,

Northeast promoter.

Chicago.

No, thank, remember Chicago.

Barnett was out of Chicago pretty early on.

And then

they all got together at that point.

Apparently, I mean, they were spending holidays at each other's houses in these letters.

So that's what there was a lot more.

The wizard.

Not only were there a lot more wrestling promoters in the 40s and 50s than there were in the 60s and 70s, but they stayed in touch with each other.

They all knew what the fucking scuttlebutt was.

Is there anything from Barnett to Pfeffer?

You know, I'm thinking, I don't know anything about them having a relationship or any dealings with each other.

See, that's a thing there may very well be, but you can literally search any name in the wrestling business between the 30s and the 60s, and there's something.

Even if I opened up a goddamn Roy Welch file, I said, Roy Welch, 1941.

I'm like, oh my God, what could that be?

And it was a letter from him asking if he could get the Swedish Angel booked.

But it was nothing.

But in Nashville, right?

But point being,

then there was other stuff with the Gulis-Welch office

later on when he got with the Fargo's.

But there's.

There's something with anybody's name on it that was in the wrestling business.

So you just have to just keep looking until you can't look anymore.

You know, Brian, what we should do after we do all this research into Jack Pfeffer

is it gives you stress and it gives you anxiety trying to figure all this out.

You need to calm your brain down.

You need to unwind and maybe look for a natural way to relieve all the aches and discomfort of sitting there poring over all of these old files.

I mean, alone, my finger from turning pages was sore as it could be.

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We've made ourselves happy today.

I hope everybody's enjoyed the discussion, but we got to talk about just a little bit of the modern wrestling.

I caught a few of the highlights of AEW's effort on Wednesday night, July 23rd, and we'll bring you up to date on that real quick.

And then more good stuff next week.

But having said that, what in the world?

They're at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago.

They got a very not only exuberant and passionate audience, but a forgiving one.

But their first match on TV,

Adam Page, the new world champion, against Wheeler, the stooge of the Boer Horseman.

And they're showing a video during the match that started in a brawl on the floor where apparently all of Moxley's guys beat Colt Cabana up and got blood on him on Saturday Night's Collision.

I didn't know he was still there.

But they have a big fight on on the floor.

It's the new world champion against the stooge of the group.

And

they're not treating him like Dominic Mysterio.

They're treating him like fucking Dominic DiNucci in Australia in 67.

And finally,

Paige wins and then gets a logging chain,

wraps it around his fist, and punches.

Wheeler in quotation marks and misses him with this giant chain that you can't work with.

And anybody can tell him you can't work with it.

And then he mounted him and hit him about five more times that was obviously fake also.

But Wheeler got juice anyway.

And then he wrapped the chain around Wheeler's neck and started to throw him over the top, but decided not to do it.

And then he left him.

The end.

The new world champion has all he can handle, beating up the stoo with a chain and then has mercy on him.

Am I thinking that maybe his title reign is not starting off to be as dominant as one might think it would be?

With this, you know, there's a weird schism there between people who watch it and think kind of like what you just said, and same way I thought, and people who think, like, oh, this is such a great new kind of world title reign.

He comes out, he does the promo saying everything's for the fans and he loves the fan.

Just the promo last week, and then this match with with Yuda, and then the forgiveness.

It's working for the AEW fans that like Adam Page, but to a lot of other fans, it just makes him seem like a weak, you know, a baby face, a weak baby face, just waited for the right moment to be exposed.

Well, let's move on to what I thought was, I don't know if it was the highlight of the program, but

it involved much of the top talent, and

it should be the highlight of the program.

But I'm

they have another,

they have two more tournaments, don't they, going on?

Eliminator matches for the world tag title shot, and then there's eliminators for one of the women's titles that some of the women hold.

So this tournament thing for the tag team title was FTR against Hong Kong Fuy and Kevin Knight.

And, you know, there's something tonight if they could get him away from the little douchebag.

But he looks silly standing next to the guy.

But

he's got two teams, Tony does, that could be taken seriously in a wrestling situation.

And occasionally, one of those pops up on this program, FTR and the Hurt Syndicate.

And he's determined to put both of those teams in with these two dip shits till he kills both of them off.

And so now we got to see FTR

go almost 20 minutes with children.

And they're trying, I know they're trying to have a match with these guys,

but they're going beyond them.

They're in over their head.

The first big move of the match, FTR went for the shatter machine on Spitball,

and Knight was supposed to come in and break it up, and he forgot to.

So

Cash boosted Spitball up in the air, and then they all froze.

And there's Spitball up in the air, and they're just standing there.

And then Dax goes to hit him or punch him or something.

And he's like, Come in here, dip shit.

So FTR

put themselves in the right place for these guys and waited for them to do their stunts, but

it's not being productive.

It went through two breaks.

Did you see the part where Fui

did the moonsault off the top rope to the floor and missed both, went right over the top of both of them, and they all fell anyway?

I did see that, yes.

It's good that he can backflip like that and land on his feet, but isn't he supposed to hit the guys that he's supposed to be diving on?

It should look like that, at least, yes.

There should be some suggestion of that.

So So finally, Dax beat Kevin Knight by holding Stokely's crutch for leverage.

So they didn't even beat Spitball.

So then they go to do the promo, FTR and Stokely, and they're booing over Stokely.

Stokely's mad.

He's got the crutch because he got speared by Edge.

Edge belongs in prison.

He's screaming over the people, and then they play Edge's music.

And Edge comes out on the stage, but he's not allowed to attack FTR.

Brian,

if Stokely can go to Tony Kahn

and get Tony Khan to agree that if Edge attacks FTR, then he'll fire Edge,

then if you were another wrestler on the roster, wouldn't you be going to Tony Khan saying, well, how about nobody can attack me either?

Yeah, this is the Andrade Sammy Guevara thing.

You'll get fired if you hit him.

All right, I'm going to punch him right in the mouth.

It doesn't make too much sense why the heel manager would convince the commissioner, the owner, the general manager, whatever it may be

for this.

Like there's no reasoning for

this stipulation all of a sudden.

Well, and also it's like the intercontinental title or the

what is the goddamn title?

Now I made fun of it too much.

The unified continental, whatever the fuck.

Some of the rules for one of those titles is that nobody can interfere.

And as I've said before, well, if you can make it that way once, then the fans know you could make it that way anytime you want.

So then that means every time that somebody interferes, it's a promoter's fault.

But I digress.

Edge comes out and he's not mad at these people at all.

He's being very

blasé about this.

He said, well, I may not be able to attack you,

but I've made a deal with somebody to do what I can do.

And then they play the Hurts Syndicate music.

So now

the babyface has made a deal with other heels

to fight the heels that he's not allowed to fight.

This shit is gibberish.

Then the Hurts Syndicate hits and fights FTR, and they got security and they're all over the floor.

And the Hurts leave FTR down.

So, in the ring, Edge tries to spear Stokely,

but Stokely shoves the security guard in front of him, and the camera missed it anyway.

They had to replay it.

But Edge speared the security guard.

Why was Edge trying to spear Stokely?

Because wouldn't that count?

I guess wouldn't that be the main goddamn thing?

I guess

he can't hit FTR, but he could beat up the manager who arranged for that arrangement.

Like he did last week.

That's right.

Stokely forgot to include himself.

You know, when the so it, I'm just sorry.

Go ahead.

I was just going to say at this point, we're 40 minutes into the show, and then they're going to come back and do another thing, but go ahead.

No, the segment, and this segment had been going on for seemingly 40 minutes.

If you go to the beginning of the tag team match, when the Hurt Syndicate came out,

my first thought was, oh, I guess I was wrong.

They're baby faces.

Yeah.

Like, okay, I guess that's what it is.

I mean, the other way is that just that they're not heels, they're not faces.

They're, in a sense, bounty hunters.

You hire them, whether you're a heel or a babyface, and they'll beat up whoever you want beaten up.

And they left

and they left the heels laying.

But is that a standard babyface move for Edge to say, well, I'll just pay these other heels to fucking just

well, he's getting a lot of money.

No, I mean, it's

it was a whole interesting series of events.

I have to say, it was my favorite thing on the episode because I was intrigued by just the way everything was transpiring.

It's now multiple times this has happened where

a match or a promo doesn't end.

It just kind of goes into the next thing.

And before you know it, you're like, oh, there's all new people out here.

What's happening?

Yeah, you've lost your thread to the

start of the thing.

Well, wait a minute.

Nobody was out here when this whole thing began.

Why are they even having this Eliminator tournament if they could just get a match with them right now?

What do you need the tournament for?

Okay, FTR won the match.

Just give them the match.

They have to go beat another team to get to the match.

The heels have to overcome all these obstacles.

Yes.

To get to the babyface.

Every good heel has to have a mountain to climb to triumph over a no-good babyface.

Rats, rats, double crossers.

So then they did another thing, which we'll get back to, but to get back to this thread, they were now in the back of the arena

and Renee Moxley Good is talking to the Hurt Syndicate.

And MJF comes in.

He's like, what the, what the fuck?

It took me months to get in this crew.

And now we're just boys with Edge.

Apparently they didn't consult him.

And MVP is like, it was business.

And

MJF is, well, how about helping me with my world title and a page?

And where were you?

And

Lashley grabs MGF and slams him up against the locker and says, I want you out of the hurt syndicate.

And I'm like, God damn it.

That was quick.

Exactly.

Now,

the only good thing they had going on the TV for weeks was MJF trying to get in this thing.

And now we go, okay, we got this big super group.

It's the cream.

of AEW Heels, no pun intended, super group.

And

we'll see what goes on with this.

And they're trying to help each other.

And then eventually there'll be ill feelings.

It's been what a fucking month.

He gets in the group.

There's no babyface teams

worth the hurts working with.

And

there's been nothing with them trying to help MJF.

And now

they're already jacking him up against the locker and potentially switching babyface because

the only team they've got to work with is also heels with a manager.

So, are they blowing the MJF deal off already?

And if not, what does this say?

If the idea is to not blow it off yet, and we're already teasing this kind of dissension weeks after we kind of got past this kind of dissension, what does that tell you?

There's a lot of dissension.

I think almost too much dissension.

Lashley went from not wanting him in the group, but playing around with the thumbs up, thumbs down thing to accepting him.

They all seem to be getting along great.

And then all of a sudden,

this, on this episode.

Yeah.

You've gone too far.

You've come in and interrupted my interview.

How much does it

pay?

If it's just business, I'd like to know how much it costs.

Is there paperwork?

Well, only if Jack Pfeffer was involved.

Otherwise, I think this has all been done on a verbal.

a verbal deal.

But I'm beginning to think that MJF Brian may may have made a poor business decision.

Maybe he got into business.

If they're all about the business, he got into the wrong kind of business with the wrong kind of business people.

Maybe,

maybe just maybe he could have taken his brand, him as an individual, the brand of MJF and had a dream.

You know, when we were young,

We used to have such dreams.

When we were young, it seemed that life was so

magical and logical and lyrical.

You could dream about being an astronaut or a president or a princess,

but then you get older and your dreams change because as they're smashed on the rocks of reality, you know, you just got to make money.

You just got to stick your hand in the other son of a bitch's pocket and take everything he's got.

It's a dog-eat-dog world.

You don't want to be wearing the milk bone underwear.

No.

I want to be fair.

You got to go out there and you got to take care of yourself, Brian.

Well, we got to take care of ourselves.

For a few men, we should also take care of our fellow man and society.

And of course, a great way to do that is good advice.

And maybe that's where you were going.

Good advice

for MJF or any of our friends out there.

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They can run social media campaigns.

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They'll stick their hand all the way deep in your pocket and deposit that money.

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Well, if they go deeper, they'll feel a little nuts.

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It's insanity.

I think you need to give them $2.

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Take the deal they're offering you, which is a great deal.

Well, take the $1 a month deal for yourself and then take a dollar a month trial period for some other schlub you know with a dream and they can fucking turn his dreams into reality too and then he'll owe you and then you'll have him under your thumb where you want him and he'll be over there fucking cutting your grass and toting your fucking heavy stuff and all right everyone wants a biff tannin and i guess the way to get there is Shopify.

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for mindless zombies doing your bidding.

And then every time a zombie gets his brains, you hear ta-ching.

Speaking of a zombie, but he hadn't found his brains yet.

Osprey was out there.

Did you hear about this now?

I watched this live and, you know, it's one of those things when you're watching a promo, you're like, oh, no, here comes the announcement.

And I guess that was obviously the thing they wanted people to feel before they didn't really get the announcement.

Well, but

I don't know what is legitimate and what's not with these people in the area of admitting injuries or whatever, because

his story is, and Tony Schiavone actually stayed in the ring and held the microphone.

That was nice of him to be an announcer for once.

But Osprey cut the promo with a very solemn update that he's had neck issues.

It's been bothering him for 10 months now, and he's hidden it.

He hadn't told the doctors.

And he knows he should tell the doctors.

He should tell the referees.

And he's got two herniated discs,

but he hopes to be back for Forbidden Door in a month.

It's treatable.

He's going to get the right therapy.

Now, you could easily believe that one of these guys would have herniated discs, and you can easily believe, because some of them have done it, that they would hide that condition so they could keep on

doing their dream job.

And the old days, it was because if

they know I'm hurt, I won't get paid.

Now it's just, oh, but we can't, you know, disappoint anyone.

But at the same time,

is there something there and they're making it sound more serious because Forbidden Door is coming up and they want to,

why would they want

anybody to wonder whether he was going to be be there or not?

Wouldn't they want everybody to know if they had the chance to, that Osprey was going to be there for sure?

So there has to be something to this, but

who knows what the severity is.

When the promo started, the way it was going, and you could hear in the crowd,

you hear like a noticeable groan when he talked, when he mentions his neck.

As soon as he says my neck,

everyone, and you expected the announcement.

I have to have surgery.

I'm going to be out.

It happens to a lot of guys in this generation.

Just happened to Kevin Owens after,

you know, 20 years plus of that style.

Osprey's younger, and Osprey's been wrestling a pretty high-flying, body-defying style.

I mean, just moving your body constantly and landing in ways that you're not supposed to at speed.

Moving your body in directions in which you should not be going.

You know, it's a spectacular style, but you would think if there was anyone, if there was a style that would lead to a body breaking down relatively young, it's that style.

And we've seen Omega, who

he may be hurt again

at the Okada match.

You know, he could work a few matches a year, but even that's getting to be a tough thing because of the style he established.

And

it's not one that lends itself to longevity, but, you know, it could always happen.

But when Osprey went to his neck, it sounded believable.

Everyone believed it.

Yeah.

Everyone said that

it's not.

Again, this is, you know, it's good pro wrestling in that,

you know, it could be, it's plausible.

This could be a believable story.

But then it's bad pro wrestling in that, yeah, we believe it because this guy's in a fucking car wreck every week.

But at least Tony didn't put the world title on him.

Because now he, you know,

be out for some description.

It's not like he has to go home and

spend time with his wife.

They just hired his wife.

Now, is he going to be home in England and his wife is over here wrestling?

Yeah, she ran out to silence later on the show.

Well, no,

you misunderstand.

It's just people were cheering in sign language.

You're right.

I misunderstand.

Yeah.

Anyway, after all of that

blah, blah, with the hurts in the back and everything, they had Tony Starm, Tony, Tony Starm.

Tony Starm and Billy Storks.

That should be it.

Tony Storm and Billy Starks had a match.

Billy Starks is the gangly young teenage prodigy from Louisville, Kentucky.

Here

I worry about her.

She sticks her tongue out all the time, and sooner or later, she's going to bite it off.

Tony Storm won, but here came Athena.

Brian, how many times did she try to hit Tony Storm?

And how many times did she actually

land the blow?

Did you, I kept counting.

I figured you may have a count.

I won't guess.

Well,

Athena came in with the contract case, right?

That metal clipboard or whatever that they've got their version of the money of the bank in.

And she takes the big swing and Tony Storm put her hands up and she basically blocked it.

And so she missed her with the big swing that Tony Storm took a bump for anyway.

Then she got Storm in front of the stairs and she ran her head into the steps three times.

And that looked okay.

There wasn't anything to write home about, but it wasn't bad.

And then

as Tony Storm is sitting there in front of the steps, selling,

Athena runs toward her.

And

in effect, she was trying to make the people believe apparently that she was running her pussy face first into tony storm's face i guess pussy first

you know what i mean the the pussy in the face spot

and it was going to be bam like she'd crush her in between the pussy and the stairs

but she clearly went over her head and just ran her own thighs into the stairs and tony storm's head was in between her her taint area.

It missed is what I'm trying to say.

How can you miss somebody sitting there in front of you with your own pussy?

Have you ever missed anybody with your pussy?

You know, this is a problem I have not encountered just yet, but the day is young.

She ought to have a scope on it or something.

What do you think about how far they're pushing pussy?

How far they're pushing all the Tony Storm pussy stuff.

Well, there's pussy for and pussy against.

She bit somebody's pussy.

Now somebody's hitting her in the face with pussy.

And then Alex Windsor came out

and didn't touch anybody's pussy, but she made a save.

As old,

whatcha call it, Athena was going to cash in.

Or who was going to cash?

Somebody was going to cash in.

All right, let's cash out.

Did you enjoy Swerve Strickland versus Chichi Chi Chia?

You know,

I'm not a Hetchicero fan.

I know they just signed them and they really like them.

And I think a lot of it's just the kind of

generic working on a show down the street kind of look.

I don't know.

Maybe I'm being unfair to him as a wrestler, but he looks so cheap that it just, it makes me not want to watch him have a long competitive match with the top contender.

And then only lose by disqualification.

Because they have the match and Swerve wins by disqualification when Archer comes out, knocks him off the top rope.

They beat up Swerve.

And then here Bandito and Brody King come out and make the save.

And they have a sloppy fight-off between the two heels and the two babyfaces.

As Swerve gets up, Okada comes in and whacks him in the back with a chair.

And

I've never seen anybody do it, but he can.

Okada makes hitting somebody over the fucking back with a chair boring.

And then

he goes to do something else, but Swerve gets right up and levels Okada and puts the chair on his neck and backs all the way up across the ring to Milk going to run at him and kick him.

And Okada just pulled the chair off his head and rolled out.

Yep.

Well, smart,

but it was flat.

Smart and flat.

And now, Swerve, I guess, is the one that has to try to get something out of this lazy bastard.

Well, he's a champion, he's the unified champion, so give Swerve something to go after, and

we'll see what happens.

Couldn't beat Hetchichero.

I guess Hetchichero, in a way, deserves another match.

You shouldn't just go to Swerve versus Okada.

Maybe Hetchichero deserves a shot at Okada.

What about a three-way?

All right.

Well,

so they're playing the MJF card again.

They think, oh, God, this whole show's gone to shit.

Let's get MJF back out there, see if the ratings will bump up a bit.

But he does the promo in the ring where he doesn't need Lashley to get the title back.

He's going to beat Adam Page without even having to execute his contract, blah, blah, blah.

And in Mark Briscoe's music plays.

And so

they're continuing this with him and Mark, and I'm not opposed to it.

But there was a lot of time given to this that

to get very little

result out of it.

Mark was mad because MJF stole the casino gauntlet from him, and he wanted a one-on-one match next week, and MJF said no.

And then he told Mark off because he's a loser.

And

it was dragging, even though I like both these guys at this point in the show.

And

MJF is verbally destroying Briscoe.

And Briscoe's, even though he's on the ramp, he's got to stand out there and listen.

Why don't he just come out there and just beat him up at this point?

Would you wait that long when he said all those horrible things?

And then finally, when MJF said, well, at least the fans did respect your brother Jay and not you, then Mark hits the ring and MJF runs off.

So

it's nice they were there, but it's nothing that did, did they do the same thing last week?

Or was it the week before?

Yeah, I'm not sure.

And obviously, Briscoe would be doing other things before the end of the night.

Well, yeah, because this was another one of those segments that goes into anything, but go ahead.

The MJF thing got me thinking.

If he actually

wins a title match, if he gets a title match against Adam Page and he loses, can he cash in right after his own match?

Well, that would be an interesting way of doing it, wouldn't it?

Right?

I mean, you lost, but you know, the other guy already got the shit kicked out of him.

You're prepared for this, win or lose.

Then you get a second match right afterwards.

Are you laughing?

That actually would be a neat little out to give a babyface champion that deserved an out, not Page, but somebody good.

But yeah, the babyface wins, but after the match, he gets whacked in the head with the fucking

contract case.

The guy cashes in and fucking beats him there.

That'd be some heat in a legitimate wrestling company.

What do you think?

Anyway.

You asked me, what do you think about the way they're using Mark Briscoe here with the MJF stuff?

Well, as I said, I like the idea of Mark and MJF having matches, and I like them, the idea of having dueling promos, but this just, it was the same kind of stuff they did the other day, and it just leaves Mark standing there in a lot of cases.

And

I, I, you know, normally I would say Mark needs to prove in a couple of instances that he's smarter than MJF.

He needs to outsmart MJF and come out on the

not in a way where he beats the fuck out of MJF, but where he embarrasses him and outsmarts him and pisses him off, that type of thing.

So then MJF could get heavy heat.

But MJF is in this title thing and he's with the Hurt Syndicate and all these angles are so split up that it's not really the time for Mark Briscoe, the way he's been presented, to fucking be outsmarting MJF.

It's cluttered is what it is, I believe.

There's no clear direction for everybody.

They're all over the fucking place.

And speaking of all over the place, Mark was still out there because he had a match with Claudio.

And

again,

not exactly a marquee main event, but they went 13 minutes so they could get to 10 o'clock at night.

And then when they got an overrun, one minute after 10, Mark wins with a small package.

Okay, great.

But then Marina Schaefer comes in and is the one to clip Mark Briscoe's leg and stop him.

And then here's the bunch of them.

Dick the Boozer's on the microphone, droning.

Wheeler comes out.

They're going to get heat on Briscoe.

Paige comes out to the ring all alone with his microphone in his hand

and gets in the ring.

And all these people that have gang jumped everybody just let him stand there and fucking tell Moxley off.

And he tells Moxley, I can beat you again and I can handle the pressure.

And he had some more fake, flowery verbiage that he thinks up that makes himself sound

fake.

And then he says, Next week, it's you versus me for the title.

And since I'm the champion, now we're going to play by my rules.

Everybody is banned from ringside.

And I'm going to tell you right now, since I know what your answer is, it's yes.

And then he walked off.

And Tony Kahn,

within 10 seconds, made it official.

And three seconds after that, they had a complicated graphic up on a screen airing the match and stipulations.

Okay, then how come they don't just have every match where everybody's banned?

And then they wouldn't have been able to do the last nine months of Dick the Boozer and the Boer Horseman.

But people wouldn't be screwed over time after time.

Now they're going to do it on TV.

Well, big man event next week.

The rematch from All in Texas.

Adam Page versus Jon Moxley.

No Wheeler Yuda, no Marina, no Claudio.

Be very interesting to see what happens, but that was AEW Dynamite.

Yes, it was.

And the only other thing we need to know is: did anybody watch this thing, and how many?

Well, it's starting to become a very familiar story.

AEW Dynamite on TBS, Wednesday, July 23rd, 8 to 10:05 10.05 p.m.

On average, watched by 608,000 viewers.

Oh, so they're back up over six.

That's what, 15 or 20 ahead of last week.

It is 3% up from last week, which was 588,

although it is the lowest number in the key demo since April.

So the overall number is...

You think the all-night, they just opened that all-night Wawa here down on, I think it's on Preston Highway.

That may have taken get out of here some of that demographic you guys got wawa in kentucky i thought that was just like a at first i thought it was just a pennsylvania south jersey thing but now they're up here in north jersey and they're kind of spreading no it was on the news there were people standing in line in this weather in this shitty weather for the convenience store to open

and it was packed and jammed and they had news reports on it we got a wawa

I've been to Wawa.

Wawa ain't that fucking gaga, is it?

Dennis Carluso introduced me to Wawa.

I'd never heard of it before.

And he's like, we're going to Wawa.

I'm like, what is that?

I thought it was like an amusement park.

I didn't know what the fuck it was.

Yeah, I mean, it's.

But we're going to get a sandwich.

Yeah, it's a convenience store that has sandwiches and donuts.

What the fuck?

People are easily goddamn pleased these days, but go ahead.

Again, Wawa obviously had a big effect on this overall number: 600 and

608,000 this week.

Let's go to the quarterly hour breakdown.

These were compiled by WrestleNomics,

quarter one,

8 to 8:15 p.m.

Adam Page and MJF's backstage angle.

Paige.

They had a promo where they talked to each other.

Or as it's called by WrestleNomics, an angle.

Page versus Wheeler Yuda.

Billy Starks and Athena's backstage promo.

I don't know if you saw that, but that wasn't

very promising.

I managed to skip that.

And the start of FTR versus Jet Speed.

669,000 viewers.

Ouch.

Okay.

That is the worst start

that I can remember in recent memory.

So the good thing about that is they don't have far to fall.

They should be fairly consistent.

And that is the high point in the key demo, since that's part of the story this week.

18 to 49-year-old men, 236,000.

Quarter two, 8:15 to 8:30 p.m.

The continuation of jet speed versus FTR, picture in picture twice,

578,000 viewers, 177 in the key demo.

Good God.

Okay, that's really bad.

And they lost,

what is that, 89,000?

But they have to come back up at some point to make their average now.

This is going to be one of those type of shows.

Well, we go to quarter three, 8:30 to 8:45 p.m.

The continuation of jet speed versus FTR, the post-match with Stokely Hathaway, Cope

and the Hurt Syndicate,

Nick Wayne and the Patriarchy's backstage promo, an ad break, and then Jon Moxley and Marina Shafir's very theatrical multi-camera promo,

617,000 viewers.

So they did manage to fluctuate 22,

39,000.

You know what?

I got to look at other weeks, but the appearance of Cope,

I think, is something that has helped them.

It doesn't give him a giant boost, a giant jump.

But even though he's not.

But it's like something's going on here.

Let's come back and see what's happening.

Quarter four, 8.45 to 9 p.m.

The Will Ospreay Live promo, an angle with Swerve Strickland,

or I guess Will Ospreay greeting Swerve and hugging him or whatever the hell that was.

Julia Hart and Sky Blue and Tecla video,

Willow Nightingale backstage promo, an ad break.

God, I'm glad I missed all this stuff.

The Hurt Syndicate backstage angle, and the start of Tony Storm versus Billy Starks,

578,000 viewers.

Right back where we started from.

They actually went back to the exact number of quarter two.

Well, we go to the big nine o'clock hour, quarter five, nine o'clock.

Top of the hour, baby.

Top of the hour to you.

9 to 9:15 p.m.

The continuation of Tony Storm versus Billy Starks and the post-match with Athena and Alex Winsor

and an ad break,

597,000 viewers.

So they picked up

19,000 at the top of the hour.

At this point, beggars can't be choosers, but

they've had more quarters under 600 than they've had over.

Apparently, other people thought the way I did.

We go to quarter six, 9:15 to 9:30 p.m.

The Don Callis ramp promo

and Hetchy Chero versus Swerve Shreklin with picture in picture,

573,000 viewers.

Ooh, that's the low point so far.

That will be the low point for the night.

Also, the low point in the key demo, 169,000.

So

Hetcha Chero versus Swerve wasn't doing it for the fans.

We go to quarter seven, 9:30 to 9:45 p.m.

The post-match of the previous match with the Don Callis family, Bandito and Brody King,

Ricochet and the Gates of Agonies backstage promo,

an ad break, and the MJF Mark Briscoe live promo,

631,000 viewers.

Good lord.

So

the MJF card must have worked because

do you see anything else in there that would have attracted any major amount of viewership?

No.

Obviously, that match lost a ton of viewers.

I don't think the post-match really gained a lot, but let's see what the rest of the show tells us.

We go to quarter eight.

I remind you, we have an overrun.

Quarter eight, 9:45 to 10 p.m.

Mark Briscoe versus Claudio Castignoli with picture and picture.

621,000 viewers.

Five-minute overrun, it says here.

I think it said eight minutes before, but five-minute overrun.

It was five.

It was five.

The continuation of Briscoe versus Claudio and the post-match with Adam Page and the Death Riders,

609,000 viewers.

Good lord.

They bring out the big guns and lose viewers in that.

The 631 and 621 finish for this show is amazing.

They should at least thank their lucky stars on that one.

That they got people back after what clearly made people leave is the interesting thing.

The MJF segment and the Briscoe versus Claudio, but Brisco versus Claudio was kind of a continuation of the MJF segment.

It never ended.

So at least they kept them.

Yeah.

That's AEW Dynamite for July 23rd, 2025.

That certainly is.

And this is the show that we have done for a long time today, but there was a lot going on.

And we'll be back, obviously, with the drive-thru in a few days.

And next week, on the experience, and for the next several weeks, we'll be talking about some unheard of knowledge that has been unearthed in Notre Dame about wrestling in its past.

And until then, for Brian, I'm Jim.

Thank you.

We love you.

Bye-bye.

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